Red Letter Days
by Abyssal1
Summary: AU: Prequel to Translated Thus. Jazz wishes only to meet his Prime and God, and Prowl wishes only to be done with his duty. But when Jazz befriends an injured temple slave, he may be closer to his dream - and his nightmare - than he can even imagine...
1. PROLOGUE: Locus Deperditus

_**Locus Deperditus **_

_**(...place of irremediable loss)**_

* * *

**My Prime is dead, is dead**

**My spark refuses to ignite**

**my chest is a wound**

**The sun is small, and hard**

**This crushed metal sky has fallen upon me.**

**I will sink into my planet's depths**

**I will call,**

**But he is gone, he is gone.**

**and Cybertron has died with my Prime**

**I have died with my Prime**

**Entropy comes, death's dark engine**

**turning, with all the hopeless gears of the universe.**

**Primon's Death – Gilgamech Walls**

* * *

_Iacon...shit. I'm only in Iacon. Every time, I think I'm going to wake up back in the Pit._

_When I was home after Nova's passing, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to the other 'bots until I said yes to a recalibration. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there...all I could think of was getting back into the Deeps. I'm here a decacycle now. Waiting for a mission. Getting softer. Every breem I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every breem Megatron squats in the Kaon Deeps...he gets stronger. Each time I look around...the walls move in a little tighter._

_Here in the Celestial Temple, everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service._

* * *

The pounding on the blast doors was insistent. A constant tattoo on his processors, knocking him out of his stupor into hard reality.

"Go 'way," he mumbled. "Slag off."

Then his internal comms started chirping at him, an awful imposition. Prowl, a voice was saying, Prowl, Captain. Open the door.

Cursing his dead god and his weak leaders and the race which had submitted to a powerful enemy he rolled himself off the berth.

He was not alone. A mech was still recharging on the gel slab, a long limbed Alpha, his armor plates dull with the first blush of color. Prowl rubbed his face, feeling the bloom of unpolished nanites, tried to remember in the No-Spark hell who it was.

_"Prowl, open up, that's an order."_

Prowl shoved the mech. "You. Get out of my berth."

A stir, a groan. When the face presented itself Prowl recognised one of the Tower mechs, the highest rank of that holy and arrogant race. The night before existed only as jags of shattered memory. Hot, demanding kisses. A spark case revealed. Never broken, but Prowl was impatient to receive data that wasn't his own, that wasn't the screaming of his own men cut in half by a plasma canon, that wasn't the torment of a murdered Prime, that wasn't Megatron's face leering at him.

Burnt energon taste fouled his mouth, making even the memory of pleasure disgusting to him. Prowl kicked out his leg, rolled the Alpha off.

"What did you do that for?"

"Get out."

The Alpha looked hurt. His blue eyes dimmed. He had been swept away by this sleek warrior with the hard optics, and now was being rejected. It was probably even the first time anyone had done so. "Can I see you again?"

"Not likely."

"But I'm an Alpha." Plaintive voice. The spark-adolescent had traded on his cast and beauty for years, and could not comprehend that he could not be wanted.

"I don't care what you are."

Prowl sat on the edge of his berth, head almost touching his knees. Unprocessed energon was burning a hole in his reservoir. He was awake and sober, that thing he hated most.

"And tell those slaggers outside they can go get rusted," slurred Prowl, but it was too late. The Alpha had fled and left the door open.

Uninvited and not concerned one bit, Kup strode into Prowl's room, looked around with the flinty gaze of an inspection. He noted the stained walls, the old energon burners, the empty cubes, the disarray of the berth.

"You've let things slide, Captain. I'm disappointed."

Prowl gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "Jus' waiting for the end, General. Jus' waiting for Megatron to come on in here and raze this stinking Temple to the ground."

A second mech stepped in behind Kup. If Prowl had not been Captain of the Autobot Army, his berthroom would not have been big enough to accommodate all of them. But he was, and it did, and the arrival stood back as patient and unobtrusive as a mural on the gold wall.

"We have a job for you."

"I told you, Kup, I quit. Non-operational. Sidelined."

"The Matrix isn't dead yet."

"It's in rigor isn't it? That means it won't live out the next eclipse-night."

"We've found him," said Kup. "The last remaining Nemesis clone."

Kup always sounded weary, but now there was a old, beaten timbre to his voice. Prowl was immediately on guard.

"Where?"

"Somewhere...not here. One must have got away." Kup stopped, added, "During the Purification." Just as if Prowl was some soft-shell who'd never lived through the terrible, mass-thirsty solar years between Prime Nemesis' fall and the rise of Nova Prime.

Prowl had always had combat alertness. His troops had always joked that he should have been an Oracle. How could he explain it? An awful looming feeling, the leading edge of a percussive wave before fire and slag rains upon your pitiful body.

"Where did you find him?"

_It._

Prowl felt around for an energon pipe, needing the sweet-sick rush, needed to throw walls up around himself. Otherwise the wave just kept coming and coming.

Kup and Emirate Xaaron shared a glance.

The High Councilor was the one who spoke. "In the darkness. In the shadowlands past Kaon." He paused. Not for effect. More to gather his strength. In the energon docks past the River Blood.

"A Pit mech."

"Yes."

There was something in Prowl's sparkcase, something blunt and fearful. He knew what they were going to say. The detritus of his room was forgotten now. When he at last spoke, it was with an effort.

"You intend to regrow the Autobot Matrix into _that_."

Xaaron stepped past Prowl, marched out the littered perimeter of his berthroom.

"We have gone beyond hoping for a victory. Now all we can hope for is a legacy."

Prowl turned on Kup. "What is the slagger talking about?"

Kup winced. Prowl had just cursed the High Councilor. But Xaaron only shrugged, resigned to such emotions now.

"The Autobot race is at an end," said Xaaron. "We are defeated."

Prowl only snorted. "Decepticon propaganda."

"It is true," said Xaaron quietly. "Not since the days of Alpha Duex have we been in the way of such harm."

"We survived those days."

"We had a Prime then. A living Prime. What have we got now?" Xaaron's facial pavements pulled tight. "The Matrix rotting in an Autophage core?"

At last Prowl's searching hand found an energon pipe. Some bluecake still stoppered the end. Insolent, he lit the pipe, drew in the acrid smoke.

"Senator Oberon," said Prowl tightly, "was raised in the Towers. Raised with all social graces, educated, aware of his background. And yet he was..." Prowl drew on the pipe again. "And yet he was what he was. Now you tell me you have found a mech with none of those safeguards, a mech made in the image of Nemesis, grown in the savage darkness, and you tell me you intend to make him Prime?"

"We intend to make him an opponent worthy of Megatron," said Xaaron. "You've seen the Gilgamech walls in the Celestial Temple. Some cycle soon the Autobot story will be on those walls, a long passed race."

Prowl sucked another hit of energon. He didn't want to be here, at the creeping, cowardly end of his people. It was not meant to be this way.

Xaaron continued, "What will they say of us? That we were overpowered by a stronger opponent and faded into shame and insignificance? Or that we fought to the end, match to match, a greater terror? Legacy, Prowl."

"It doesn't matter. Megatron will kill him."

"Yes. But a pit-mech's body is pain tolerant. He'll not die quickly. Perhaps we will give Megatron a battle to remember."

Kup stepped forward. "There have been some complications. The Decepticons are aware of the clone's existence. We need you to bring him in."

Prowl turned on Xaaron, flung the pipe aside. "I saw my Prime DIE!" he shouted. "His spark was torn out in front of me! Megatron crushed it like it was dust! You expect me to go through it all again?"

The golden face remained impassive. "The pit mech will be a holder of the Matrix of Leadership. Nothing more. As far as the council is concerned the Prime line is dead."

Xaaron didn't wait for a reply. He left the room. Kup frowned at Prowl.

"You think this is hard for you? You think you're the only one to see a Prime die?"

"Get out, Kup."

The old general looked Prowl up and down, as he were giving an inspection to a mere recruit on a training ground, one who had turned up lacking.

"You disappoint Nova's memory with this behavior, General. You disappoint the Matrix of Leadership."

"Get out!"

Prowl waited until they were gone before he tore the poly-gel pad off the berth. He tore it in two before flinging the pieces at the Teletraan console, and smashed the energon burner against the wall before collapsing into a corner.

"My Prime," he sobbed to the empty room. "My Prime is dead, Primus is dead, Cybertron is dead..."

Nobody replied. The bare walls echoed Prowl's entreaties. Whatever they wanted him to do, he was going to do it. He to, was what he was. A servant of Primus. An Autobot soldier. An usher of Cybertron's death.

* * *


	2. Mors Tua Vita Mea

* * *

Over the high battlements of their Kalis redoubt, more last-gasp bunker than stronghold, a gun had resumed firing. Over and over, a cough, followed by a silence, followed by shaking ground, the soft whisper of falling metal dust.

Optimus stopped mid-parry, turned off the training hologram. His faceless attacker faded away. "Close."

"That wasn't close," returned Prowl, sharper than he intended. "I've _been_ close."

Of course he had. He would not have sat in a redoubt and let the gun's voice ring out like a Decepticon victory cry.

Now he rotted here like a coward. It shamed him.

Prowl studied his charge standing in the training ring, the reason for his being _here_, when he could have been out _there_.

There was no affection in Prowl's spark towards him. The Council were raising this mech for sacrifice, and that was that. To set up any measure of a relationship would mean opening his spark to loss, and Prowl was done with experiencing that sort of pain. Optimus was a device of war, as disposable as an Empty.

"Again," said Prowl. "But now we bring in contenders."

The hologram flickered into life again, brought two friends. Optimus turned from Prowl, drew up his battlemask, and returned to his ersatz battle, ceramic sword drawn.

Arms folded, mood dark, Prowl watched from the sidelines of the training pit. The new Prime was not exactly like Nemesis, his brother clone. He had a distinct size and weight advantage. The grotesque scars where the armor had been cracked open to accommodate the Matrix of Leadership were beginning to fade, colonized by the color-nanites.

Exertion made the deep red exoskeleton gleam. For a very young mech in an older mech's body, Optimus was getting good. Too good. He was fighting three holographic attackers now, both on the highest level. They attacked him with blinding speed, flail and sword combined, and were fought off with a dangerous intensity.

The unseen gun fired again, and this time the hit was closer. Optimus caught the edge of a virtual flail along his back. Holograms they might have been, the pain inflicted was real. Optimus staggered, recovered, beheaded the attacker in one motion.

Prowl's optics narrowed to pinpricks.

_That wasn't a mistake. You took that blow deliberately. Are you hiding your skill from me?_

He turned off the hologram.

"Enough. You go wash up. You have a meeting at the temple later."

A blank look, a nod. Then Optimus was gone.

* * *

They had been hard years, the years of their culture's decline.

Prowl had done all that Xaaron and Kup had asked of him that day in his room. He had gone into the darkness, found their pit-mech, brought him back to the Temple. _Orion._ How much like Nemesis he had looked like, but in Primus' colors. It was an affront to decency, that sacred color-scheme on that massive, Pit-rimed body.

On Xaaron's request Prowl had remained close by while the High Priests began their arduous duty, to sing down the Matrix, to encourage it to set root in the borrowed protoflesh.

It was a testament to his originator that Orion had not passed over without a struggle.

For decacycles the clone had screamed and pleaded from the stone slab of his rebirth...

_"What have I done?_" it cried in plaintive dark-planet insect dialect. _"What have I done?_"

And for all that time Prowl had remained in the adjoining chambers, charged with waiting out the terrible resurrection. He had long ago learned to shut off his feelings. His spark had grown cold and dull inside his chest. It was a skill Prowl had acquired by necessity. Watching his friends die. Watching his city and culture destroyed. Watching his Prime murdered by Megatron's hand.

Not everyone had such a talent as him, to shut off all unnecessary feelings and leave himself open to fact and logic alone.

But it was not a talent he could maintain all the time. The rebirth tested him. Once he found one of his guards, Bumblebee, sobbing outside the rebirth chambers.

"I can't," cried Bumblebee. "I can't look at him any more, Prowl. It's tearing me apart."

"Who's watching him?" Prowl thundered.

Bumblebee's stricken glance told him everything.

Prowl had burst his way into the chamber, slipping on massblood. Orion, or whatever sentient identity remained, had pulled an arm free of his restraints. Half-dead, he'd clawed at his chest, the locus of his agony. The Matrix was being pulled out by its roots.

Screaming for guards, Prowl had held on to the flailing hand. "Let go you monster, let go!"

For several seconds they were locked in combat over their god, an empty shell bleeding protoflesh, and Prowl up to his arms in gore.

When the guards had come, Prowl had fallen back. He'd hauled himself into the corner. The half-mech was wailing in a language Prowl had never heard, an old language. _Language of the Primes_. The priests began to wail with him, a dreadful cacophony, and it was all Prowl could do not to join in, a mad and tuneless despairing cry.

"He is so strong," whispered old Alpha Trion later. "He may end up rejecting the Matrix. We have to prepare ourselves for the worst."

That night Prowl wrecked himself upon a pair of whores brought up from the Dead End, sparksharing with all the finesse of assault and interrogation. He could smell that massblood on his hands. Prime-flesh. He hated himself. Hated what he was doing. Hated both the whores he bought and the nameless noblemechs who visited him in desire, drawn by his bleak silences, his hard mysteries, and the way his iciness went right though to his spark.

Bumblebee was sentenced to a Stellar Cycle in the brig for abandoning duty. Prowl knew that Bumblebee would rather have spent ten in there, rather than another minute in the rebirthing room.

Finally, Prowl went to Xaaron. "I'm done with this," he said. "You have your Prime. I'm done with it."

Xaaron had sat upon his golden throne. Senator Meridian camped beside him, slender and fine, but with a fractured ambition in his optics that made Prowl uneasy.

"You have led a mighty battle, Prowl," Xaaron said. "Not just out there, but in your spark. You have had to endure terrible losses. But there is one more task you must undertake."

"Name it. I'll get back out there. Xaaron, you'll need to requisition another platoon from the Southern Vos lowlands, and we can cordon off the energon-"

He stopped. He noticed Meridian's quick glance towards the old Elder, seeking permission to speak.

"We are not going to waste time in trying to recover lost territory," said Meridian. "For now all our resources are in defending Iacon."

"Understood," said Prowl brusquely. "I'll effect repairs to my squad and we will mobilize a perimeter--"

Xaaron held up his hand, silencing him.

"We have already done this. We need you here."

Behind Xaaron, Senator Meridian's Autobot-blue eyes glittered. Prowl did not care much for the Autobot senator. He could taste Meridian's desire to achieve greatness.

"But I have spent long enough here, listening you torture a pit-mech into Primacy!" said Prowl, his voice rising to a shout.

"He is not a Prime yet!" Xaaron corrected him. "He needs to be trained. Someone has to teach him the ways of combat."

"I must respectfully decline," Prowl staid through gritted jaws. "I am a specialist fighter. I am not programmed to give basic training to spark children."

"Nothing about his training will be basic," Meridian corrected him. "Not when he has been made for one purpose alone." There was something in his optics, a keen cruelty. "And he may not even be able to speak to the Matrix of Leadership. He won't have access to Prime memories. Others will notice this. They will question his Leadership. The Autobot cause will be further eroded."

"You want me to teach him to lie? You want to deceive our people?"

Xaaron looked away. He had been incepted in the days before Autobots and Decepticons. He could remember a time before civil war. There were those that said he could even remember Primon, the first Prime.

Now he oversaw the end of the Primes, the death of his god-on-Cybertron.

Meridian spoke for him.

"We want you to do what is right. Please be aware that refusal is tantamount to treachery."

Prowl glared at Meridian. _Do what you are told, or you will be branded a traitor._

A traitor, thought Prowl. The punishment for treachery was death.

_Do it, or die._

Prowl affected a deep, almost mocking bow. "As you wish."

* * *

So now he waited, here in the Kalis redoubt, waited for death. His Prime, his people.

After Optimus left the training room, Prowl stayed behind to clean up a little. Scatter fresh metal shavings across the floor damp from Optimus' exertions, stack the blunt weapons, polish the holographic lenses. Slave work, but Prowl liked the simplicity of it. The act reminded him of his days in the Autobot Academy, the discipline of ordered surroundings when all else was chaos.

"You know, if the Decepticons end up taking over, you'll always find employment as someone's servant."

Prowl looked up to see Elita at the doorway, her insect arm held almost delicately in front of her.

"You might have to lose those lovely weapons racks, though," she added.

"I see you've had some alterations done of your own," said Prowl coolly.

Elita patted her new armor plates. "Yes, the Nemesis clone was brought in with a companion. She had nice armor. Such a pretty color."

"You shouldn't be here, Elita."

"I know."

"How did you get past the guards?"

A smile. I am visiting a friend."

Her voice was Temple-prim, but Prowl heard the darkness behind it. Elita may have been a failed Oracle, but she still had hidden political powers. "She tells me your secret project is coming along quite well."

"And what project might that be?" Said in warning, for there were very few that knew what they were doing here.

Elita lingered at the doorway. With her patchwork shell, her seductiveness was ugly. "The new Prime. What is his name Prowl? Is he strong, like Vector, or beautiful, like Nova? Or does he echo other Primes who we have erased from our history?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Oracle."

"And here I am, thinking that Nova had no offspring," she said. "Me, accused of not predicting the end of the Prime lineage, and exiled for it. I deserve some kind of apology."

"Elita," said Prowl, "If Meridian finds you here, he'll have you dropped in the nearest smelting pool."

She held up her one anthro hand. "Peace, Prowl. I shall return to the Underhalls and will not bother you much longer."

Prowl waited until the Oracle was gone before he allowed himself to frown. If Elita One knew about Optimus, then others would know, and if the word was out that they'd secured a Prime – the Decepticons would not be long in the dark. He could already feel the convergence of moments. Their time to act was limited.

The final day was coming...

* * *

_(...to be continued...)_


	3. Non Constat

* * *

Life's path was not always like the Autophage paths, Jazz decided. Life was not always so proscribed and rigid. One could still dream of escape, and change.

Far below, the twilit wastelands of Vos seemed to ripple through resin windows. Jazz held his hand to the pane. The resin was warm to touch. Soon the mythical sunlight would pour across the horizon.

He brought his hands to his visor, the new addition to his face. He was from the dark-planet, the shadow-lands that border the great wound they called the Pit. His visor would always mark him as different, but perhaps, perhaps if he worked hard enough, endured enough, had seen enough, one day he would be granted an audience before Prime. Before God.

Not long after his armour had hardened and he had joined the Stanix security patrols, an oracle had come to him in the street, begging energon. She had been a shabby thing, armour plates hanging off her decayed frame like signposts to a hard life.

"Your fortune," she had whispered through static, "Your fortune."

The old mech looked as if she had incepted many sparks, had pulled great amounts of mass from the warp and weft of the universe. Time for these creatures was not the same as linear time. It was a soup, a fog, a potentiality to madness.

He'd given her half his rations, more out of feeling sorry for her than of any need to know his future.

Oracle she might have been, but she hadn't expected such a bounty. She shoved the yellow energon into her mouth, and her blown-fuse optics rolled in pleasure.

"You will meet a great Prime," she hissed. "You will rise to the highest levels of your station."

Tonight he recounted the story to Hound.

"...I know she was only just saying that to get more energon, but for a moment, it was a possibility. That I might actually stand in the presence of a Prime, that he would look at me and-" Jazz stopped short.

"And what?"

Like many people who dream of an impossiblity, Jazz had not really imagined much past the event.

"I don't know. What would you say to a Prime?"

"Hello, might be a start."

Jazz smiled at his new friend. "Wouldn't that be something?"

Hound had boarded the ferry at Fort Scyk, a city on the furthest edges of their planet's permanent night-time. Jazz had been surprised to see any Beast Caste at all in the dark regions. They were mechs of the daylight and the sweet energon from the sun, not the weight of darkness and constant deprivation.

Jazz had immediately called the drab little mech to his side.

"What's someone like you doing in a place like Fort Syck?" Jazz asked.

Hound was used to dark-planet directness and had explained that his caste was poor and ill-educated. They'd made bad choices during the first vorns of the civil war, supported the wrong factions.

"I'm going to Iacon, to try out for the Autobot Academy," said Hound with a fanciful confidence. "I will prove my clan's worthiness to be called Autobots."

"Me too," Jazz confessed. "I'm the first mech from my city to be invited into Autobot Central as a Academy Prospect, and I intend to do my people proud."

Jazz understood that need to overcome such a lowly status. He knew then that he and Hound would be friends.

As the slow ferry passed Iacon, the disc of the sun began to peep out over the horizon. An incredible golden light began to spill out over the suburbs separating Vos and Talis. Jazz stared at it with mounting awe.

"The sun, Hound. Oh, I never thought it would be so warm!"

Hound smiled self-indulgently as Jazz held his hands up to the window as if trying to catch photons in the net of his fingers. Jazz knew he was being incredible gauche, but his deep memories knew the value of sunlight, of free energy pouring down from the sky in a constant rain. Why, you could just open up a collection dish and capture the energon from the sunlight yourself.

He watched a dozen mechs board the slow ferry at Talis. Although this was the most economical way to travel, and the passengers were little more than Empties, they shone with bright colours. Their armour-plates fitted to mass-positive bodies. None of them looked hungry.

Quite unexpectedly he felt a flint-strike of envy. These people would not know the meaning of struggle and pain. Their existence was charmed.

Just watching the steadily lightening planet slip by underneath him became tiring, and he slipped into recharge for a time. He was nudged awake by Hound's elbow.

"There, on the horizon."

So Jazz's first view of Iacon was made in glory, the impossible sun beaming down upon the slow-ferry, making the inclusions in the resin windows sparkle. Jazz looked at the distant, golden towers, shining as if they'd been cast in molten metal, and he knew in his spark that nothing in his life would ever match this moment. Washed in this brilliant light all things seemed possible, acceptance into the Autobot ranks, a life in daylight, even a meeting with the Prime.

"I will never forget this day," he said to himself, but perhaps not so quietly for Hound looked at him and smiled.

'No, we will not," he said, and squeezed Jazz's shoulder.

The slow ferry only spent a few moments at the main Iacon terminal station, before its blind Autophage engine drove it onwards, still following the eternal, instinctive path around the planet.

Jazz and Hound jostled off onto a busy platform. Even with his visors, Jazz was a little disoriented by the constant light, so Hound held out his arm for guidance.

"You'll get used to it in a few cycles," said Hound.

Moving through the crowd presented another problem. Jazz had heard of the curfews that restricted travel to certain times - they were living in a time of war after all - so the crush of Mechbodies seemed insurmountable.

Hound looked around, lost, until he saw a yellow mech holding up a red pennant bearing the Autobot logo.

Together they braved the crowd until they reached the pennant holder. What an odd mech, thought Jazz. He was only a shade smaller than Jazz, his colour-nanites a bright, pure-mech yellow, the colour of sunshine. An Iacon mech, but his features were decidedly of an Insect caste.

"You the prospects?" snapped the mech as they approached. "For the infantry?

"For the Academy," said Hound proudly. "We're here for pre-Academy training."

Jazz nodded in agreement. "I'm Jazz, and this is Hound." He didn't need to add any qualifiers, but he did anyway. "We're from the dark planet."

"I can see that," said the yellow mech. He shook each of their hands. I'm Bumblebee, of Iacon."

Jazz fought to hold his surprise. The name had been altered to fit an Autobot dialect, but there was no escaping its Insect origins. Now he could see the design shibboleths that marked Bumblebee as Insect caste despite his colour-nanites.

"You're Insect?" he asked in Insect dialect.

He was met with a glare.

"My mass donor was," Bumblebee replied. "But my incept parent was true mech of the Ancient line. I am of Iacon, and don't you forget it."

Bumblebee stalked off, and Hound gave a shrug before following. Jazz picked up his shell-case and ran after the pair just before they were swallowed by the crowd.

Now that he'd met someone of the Insect Caste being part of the Academy selection process, Jazz felt much less anxious. Nightbeat had been so explicit, always warning him that Autobots never allowed anyone less than a High-Beast, Mech or Alpha into their senior ranks. Bumblebee proved that he would not be some curiosity.

"Are you an Academy graduate?" asked Jazz, unable to hold back his excitement. "Which unit are you from?"

Bumblebee looked at Jazz, and the hot blue gaze did not waver. "I'm not a Academy graduate. I'm an Infantry guard. No Insect or dark-planet mech has ever been allowed to graduate from the Autobot Academy. Now come on, we have to get to the barracks before curfew."

With that he moved on again, radiating unfriendliness, leaving Jazz and Hound to follow like space debris after a wounded ship.

* * *

"Is it true?" asked Jazz. "Has no dark-planet mech ever passed through the Academy?"

They had been assigned a sponsor, a red mech called Cliffjumper. Jazz wondered if Bumblebee's hand hadn't been involved in his sponsor's choosing, for Cliffjumper was also a mech with strong Insect leanings. He had a broad face, little horn-like antennae, and his accent had that Insect creole about it, a lilting warble and directness that was decidedly not Autobot.

"No, none of them have," said Cliffjumper, brusque. "Until recently. This war has required the Autobot hierarchy to give up on its traditions. They need good soldiers, wherever they can find them now. Too many have been se4duced to the Decepticon side. Even Alphas."

"Alphas?" Hound perked up. "Are there Alphas in our class?"

Cliffjumper gave them a narrow look. "There will be many different Cybertronians in this batch of Academy prospects. It is very diverse this year, which could be our last."

Cliffjumper led them to an old barracks on the outskirts of Decagon, the great Autobot military stronghold. The dormitories that had clearly not been in use for a long time. He pointed out a pair of berths that would be theirs until their prospect-probation had finished, and they were - Primus willing - given approval to attend the Autobot Academy, still the highest seat of learning and military training in all of Cybertron.

"It's not very welcoming," said Hound, once Cliffjumper had left them alone. "They haven't even let us into the main dormitories within the Decagon borders."

"Perhaps it's full," said Jazz, always willing to see the best in everything. "I'm sure others will come soon enough."

"I suppose."

"I feel closer to Prime already." Jazz lay back on his dusty berth. He pulled from an overlap in his armour a little icon on a chain, an amulet of gold surrounding a glowing radium crystal.

The light touched Hound's face, and even Hound made a quick, respectful sign on his chest. "The Matrix of Leadership," he breathed. "Primus."

Jazz smiled, knowing that Hound shared his faith.

"I am here," said Jazz, his voice hollow with awe, "In this place where the Matrix lives. I cannot quite believe it, but I know that my life will be complete if one day I am allowed audience to Him, to see Him before me. It will happen. I know it in my spark,"

He pressed the icon to his chest and looked up at the ceiling, almost believing he could see beyond the skin of the universe to that time of his dream.

"It will be many, many solar cycles before you have rank enough to be in Prime's presence," intoned Hound. "And who knows if you'll be given leave to speak with him? Let's just take it one cycle at a time."

"Are you always this pessimistic?"

Hound sighed, and he gave another shrug.

"I'm sorry Jazz, being such a spoil. I know this is a special moment for you. It's just...you look like someone who has always been honored and treated with respect back in your home city. I know how dark-side mechs are treated ill, here. They think us lazy and untrustworthy."

"We will work hard, and prove them all wrong," said Jazz.

"Sure," said Hound, but he didn't seem quite so convinced.

* * *

Though Prowl tried not to make it a habit, sometimes he went to visit Ironhide.

Even at his rank as Second, it was still not easy to secure a pass into the Decagon Prison without some cajoling and bribing. The prison guards were reluctant to allow their prisoners access to the general population, especially when the prisoner concerned was charged with attempted Primicide, that almost unspeakable act.

Prowl often brought with him his Tactical board, a multi-level game designed to simulate a military campaign. It was a minor conceit of his, that few people could beat him in a game of Tactical.

After the right people were paid off, Prowl found himself sitting in the deepest dungeon, at a plain table with Ironhide. If not for the chains and the surroundings, they could have been a pair of gentlemechs enjoying that most noble of pastimes.

Prowl set up his pawns across the lower level of the Tactical board. It was a position of disadvantage in the beginning of the game, but as the campaign unfolded, and the opposition sought places to hide and regroup, it would quite suddenly become a slaughter field.

Ironhide nodded at Prowl's placement.

"Always thinking in the long-term, I see."

"Either that, or we think of ourselves." Prowl tipped his chin at Ironhide's own placements, defensively protecting the main piece, The Great Lord.

The game begun in silence. Prowl was audacious and relentless, single column attacks into outlying troops, quickly whittling and demoralizing.

But Ironhide was stubborn. Unlike a lesser player, he wasn't about to pull his best pieces away from their redoubt. He held steady.

After a while, Prowl said, "How's Ratchet?"

"He's been working in the Prison repair bay." Ironhide gave Prowl a quick, sly grin. "He has become an expert in repairing rape and torture injuries. They are quite different from those of clean combat."

Prowl fumbled a move which Ironhide took advantage of. "Don't the guards keep watch on you enough?"

"They are not all inflicted by prisoners upon each other."

Prowl made a considered retreat with a scout unit, buying time. When Ironhide had been identified behind the nearly-successful attempt to kill Optimus, Prowl had taken it hard. They were brothers in arms, him and 'Hide. Ironhide had only been one sol ahead of him in the Autobot Academy, marked for great things even then.

But Ironhide was a mech of deep pride and passions. His personal integrity was more important to him than Autobot Law. When the two priorities were in sync, Ironhide was magnificent, glory bound. But too often the values diverged.

Once, Prowl had seen Ironhide cuff an Alpha for disrespecting a old Insect-caste infantry soldier. An Alpha! For an Insect! Even by Law, Insect-castes were little more than vermin compared to the sacred line of Alpha Prime, and yet Ironhide had taken it upon himself to impose equality, no one mech worth more than another. Incredible.

The Alpha-bot had complained of course, and Ironhide had been busted down to Regular, but the respect he gained made him a leader among all. Even at his new low rank Ironhide was saluted, given respect.

Prowl had never asked Ironhide why a mech so principled would try to kill his Prime. Ratchet's part in the assassination, Prowl could understand. The old medic overseer had been close to the armour-donor, Orion Pax. What rationality was there with Ironhide? Every time the subject was brought up, Ironhide would lock his mouth up, refuse to speak.

Today he watched Ironhide refuse to give up defending his Great Lord piece, and was puzzled even more.

"So, you accuse the guards of torture, now?"

"No," said Ironhide, "many of them are Insect and Infantry. They are good mechs doing a difficult job. But the interrogation unit is sometimes over-enthusiastic in chasing intel."

"By the Interrogation unit, you mean Jhiaxus."

Another quick grin. Ironhide had learnt to be crafty in prison. He used to be so blunt and direct. Prowl wasn't certain if he liked it.

"Yes, Jhiaxus. The High Command send more and more traitors to him every day-cycle, as you are probably aware."

"No, I am not."

"Oh, I forget," said Ironhide, discovering and knocking down all of Prowl's scouts, "You are kept caring for your monster."

Prowl could feel his armour-plates bristle, but he did not rise to the barb.

"Yes, I am kept training _Prime_. I am not aware of every little thing the Autobot Command is doing to ensure our victory."

"Everything little thing it can," said Ironhide. "Ratchet tells me of the mechs that come to his medic rooms, their spark shells almost destroyed from the interrogation. And when they heal - so ugly."

"They are still traitors, Ironhide."

"Not all. One soft-shell was innocent and his spark-break and interrogation happened at once." Ironhide's optics were white-hot at the thought and indignity of it. "Afterwards his spark case looked like it had been mashed through a grinder. Do you think he would ever find a lover with a spark like that?"

"That's a very shallow way of looking at things. Injuries from war are just as disfiguring."

"But you alone should know a spark-break is the measure of a mech. Even with you and your Alpha-virgins, you are gentle."

"Still keeping tabs on me, 'Hide? Tell me what happened to this soft-shell of yours. I can tell when you're trying to prove a point."

"Huh, Ratchet could only patch him up. Then he killed himself. Ripped out his young spark, right in front of me. Poor little innocent mech."

Prowl could tell Ironhide was trying to psyche him out. Prowl gritted his jaw.

"Jhiaxus can be rough. It goes with the territory of chief interrogator."

"He was Nova's favourite, was he not?"

"Nova had many favourites."

"But Jhiaxus had particular perversions that drew Nova to him."

"You must not speak so ill of a Prime, 'Hide."

Ironhide was starting to flex his legions across the Tactical board. He had positioned them well. Prowl foud himself cormered.

"Tell me Prowl, do you ever look upon that Monster Prime of yours with something more than fraternal duty? Do you ever wish that you could lie with him the way Nova never did with you?"

"Ironhide," said Prowl warningly. "That's out of line."

"That's why you always couple with Alphas, is it not? Why you bring them to your berth almost exclusively? I always knew you were in love with Nova Prime, and it galled you to see him so infatuated with cruel Jhiaxus rather than loyal Prowl."

Prowl stood up suddenly, knocking the unfinished game of Tactical over.

"I said, shut it Ironhide! You never know when to quit!"

Ironhide stood up too, but the chains held him at a stoop. "Go on then, ask me, ask me why I tried to kill our _Prime_! You know I've not told anyone, nobody at all, even when they threatened to set Jhiaxus on me, interrogate my spark!"

But they hadn't, had they, thought Prowl. Because they already intended Prime to die. They just didn't want anyone to get in there first.

"Speak, Ironhide, if you're so Primus-damned principled. Tell me what is worth murdering your God for."

Almost imperceptibly, Ironhide flinched. Prowl knew from quiet sources that Ironhide still held to the old religion, still prayed to Primus, the All Spark and the Matrix as one holy trinity.

"We debase ourselves," said Ironhide, so quietly now that Prowl could barely hear him. "Just by having that thing exist we debase ourselves, as a people and a race. We used to see a Prime as a figurehead, a Leader." He let loose a breath of air from his vents. "I was there when Senator Meridian beat him for refusing to open his chest plates. That first day. Meridian called him such worthless things then, and opened his chest anyway, spread it like a Dead End pimp parading his whore."

Suddenly Prowl remembered who it was that Ironhide had struck, all that time ago. A young Meridian, fresh out of the Academy and angling for senatorship, a strutting fool of an Alpha even then.

Ironhide continued, relentless. "That...a Prime? Struck and cowering like a servant? Matrix hanging out like a dead thing? My spark broke, Prowl. I was cast adrift. To have called that Prime would have invalidated myself, made me submissive to cowards. I'd be better off a Decepticon."

"Shush," said Prowl, afraid for his friend. They were given privacy, but he was certain that there were still listeners.

"Why should I be silent? My spark keeps open house. They know that I speak what everyone thinks in private."

"You are not alone in your opinions," Prowl murmured. "But they will kill Optimus soon enough."

"By having him fight Megatron?" Ironhide gave a brittle laugh. "You need a leader to approach Megatron, to be worth the battle, and I'm sorry to say, your monster is not even that."

* * *

[TBC]

* * *


	4. Abusus non tollit usum

* * *

_**Abusus non tollit usum - misuse does not remove use. An axiom stating that just because something can be, or has been, abused, does not mean that it must be, or always is. Abuse does not, in itself, justify denial of use.**_

* * *

...

...

...

They were dozing in recharge, which was how one passed one's time in the darkness. Energon was never wasted in hobbies and idle frivolities. In the dark one worked and slept, and that was it.

So it was a surprise to have a blue-grey mech appear at the door to the dormitory and start banging on one of the berths with a length of scaffolding pipe.

"Get up, you lazy dark-side wretches," he barked. "You can't go sleeping through an eclipse night!"

Jazz groaned, and rubbed the dust from his visors. Hound was already glaring in annoyance at their interloper.

"Who the No-Spark are you?"

"I'm Trailbreaker, bolt-head, haven't you heard of me?"

Both Jazz and Hound shook their heads.

Trailbreaker made a turbo-line towards a contraption at the end of the barracks, one of the oddities they had been too leery to touch in case they broke it.

With a flourish the stranger drew off two cubes of solar energon and handed it to Jazz, then Hound.

"Is this part of our rations?" asked Jazz, wary of making a faux pas. This could be a test, some kind of hazing ceremony, for all he knew.

Trailbreaker poured his own cube from the siphon, and tossed the contents into his mouth, followed by a long exhale. When he spoke, there was a patient kindness in his words.

"This is not the darkness, brothers. The sun gives its free bounty. As a soldier of the Autobot cause, this is all yours."

Jazz had never in his severe life tasted energon so sweet. He marvelled at the yellow colour, the astringent flavor without the undertow of bluecake bitterness.

"Nice, yes?" Trailbreaker watched Jazz's face. "Wait until you see what the streets of Iacon has in store tonight. Pink and green, and even a rumor of a place that sells white energon, the nectar only the priests and Prime are allowed to feast on."

At the mention of Prime, Jazz perked up.

Trailbreaker poured himself some more energon, and hustled them outside.

* * *

There were nights in Kaon when the moon would reflect the unseen sun and make the streets bleed silver. They were nights of fear and superstition. Such nights were bad nights the time of madness.

But for the mechs of the sun-side, a rare eclipse night was a time for revelry and carnival, a time to allow the hidden sides of your personality to come out.

Trailbreaker transformed into a medium-sized Autophage in the same blue-grey livery, and sped off along the high road out of Decagon towards Autobot City.

Reluctantly, Jazz transformed down, and followed him, Hound not far behind. True autophages - the living fauna of Cybertron - never went so quickly, never dodged and weaved among their fellows. Any Decepticon patrol would spot them as Autobots from a hundred klicks away.

As if he sensed Jazz's concerns Trailbreaker commed, "_There's no Decepticons here. They hate eclipse nights. "_

If Jazz had wanted to argue, he had no time. The silicon glass spires of Autobot City, Iacon's largest precinct, rose up in towering, multi-coloured shards. Without slowing down Trailbreaker came out of his disguise with an experienced somersault, and headed off down a tertiary conduit.

If the crowds of the station had been intent and serious, these ones were completely different. A dozen mechs, all wearing masks, converged upon the two young dark-siders with murmurs and grasping hands.

Jazz smelt burnt energon. Fingers began to probe Jazz's pelvic armour, the seams of his chest. They were so intimate he was frozen with fear.

Before the tickles could turn into molestation, Trailbreaker turned up and batted them away.

"Scram, you slaggers!"

"Are they always that familiar here?" asked Jazz, rattled. He patted his chest, trying to make sure the plates had not been breached.

"Primus, no. But there are so few chances to release yourselves in normal life, the mechs tend to let themselves go just too much." Trailbreaker looked Jazz up and down, "And if you don't mind me saying, you're a rare beauty, if someone was to go for that exotic look."

Jazz felt both disturbed and oddly pleased at the older mech's compliment. Doubly so, when Hound chimed in, "It's true Jazz, and don't pretend it's not."

He waved them off, but found himself walking with a strut in his step.

Trailbreaker led them to an energon bar under one of the tallest spires, where sellers bartered spare parts, where massblood and condensation limned the streets. The bar's name, _The Piston_, was written in a Beast Caste script, and flashed green neon.

As they sat at a table, a pair of prostitutes plied their trade outside. Jazz goggled at them. The pair were striking, well-fed mechs of a clearly high-born caste. Why, in the darkness a pair like that would be courtesans feted in the richest Warlord's palace, and here they were on the streets.

"You want?" said Trailbreaker casually.

"Oh, no, no," said Jazz.

"Saving your pretty spark for someone important?"

The energon was making him feel hot, and shamed, and also because he had felt a curl of lust in him, an itch in his spark, a need to have his armour touched. There had been only that one time with Nightbeat, but even then they'd not gone beyond kissing and petting. Their sparks had never been revealed to each other, though not from want of Nightbeat's trying. And the specter had come up, of mass sharing instead, which had soured their relationship from that time forward.

"Why are they here?" Asked Hound of the courtesans at the door. "Mechs like that could command high prices."

"This is a soldier's tavern," Trailbreaker replied. "They can make good credits here. If you go into the deep conduits, then you will see the mechs who are reduced to filth and degradation." Trailbreaker was more than a little drunk, from the slur in his voice. "It is said that you can find those so degraded, they will open their armour for you, allow the osmosis of your mass inside them." He shuddered. "And there are those who will do it."

If this revelation had sent other young recruits into paroxysms of disgust, Trailbreaker hadn't reckoned on a pair of shadow-siders who knew of this practice.

"Mass-sharing," said Hound.

Trailbreaker made a sign for him to keep his voice down. A group of old warriors glared at Hound from a nearby table.

"We know of such things," said Jazz. "It is a punishment in the gladiator pits, where one mech is beaten and the other...spills into him before killing him."

Trailbreaker stared at Jazz. "You have seen it?"

"I was in the Stanix Security Patrol. We had heard of an illegal gladiator fight." He swallowed, the memory harsh. But he would need to be able to calmly relay worse information, if he was to be a top-level soldier. "I was the first to arrive, and could not make a move until my backup arrived. So I had to watch it happen. I have never heard a mech cry, as this one did. He was contaminated, Trailbreaker. Utterly."

Jazz realised that Trailbreaker was not a mech often stunned into silence, so the silence was profound.

"Well," Trailbreaker said at last, "that was more information than I was expecting."

"I'm sorry," Jazz said, "I didn't realize. Things are harsh in the shadows. Life doesn't have the same - uh - delicacy it has here."

Trailbreaker nodded. "Accepted, friend. I was told that your kind are crude...not that there's anything wrong with that..." He trailed off, embarrassed.

To break the somber mood, he bought them another round of heavy-isotope energon. When the uncomfortable feeling ended, Trailbreaker's attention was caught by a raucous group of mechs that had entered The Piston and had been shown to a table carved out of a single aluminium crystal.

Jazz couldn't help but stare. All five of them were beautiful. No, more than that. Their faces seemed carved out of the finest carbon-rich steel, their armour layered with complex, iridescent pigments of colour-nanites so dark that they shone.

"Oh," breathed Hound. "Alphas!"

Jazz could scent-taste his new friend's skittish, almost sexual arousal. Hound stared, open mouthed, stinking of longing.

"Don't look too closely, friend," cautioned Jazz. "I have heard that an Alpha will only couple with another of equal rank."

"It's true," added Trailblazer. "Every Alpha-caste mech is a descendant of Alpha Prime." He pointed surreptitiously at the table. "Note them well. They will be spending time with you in pre-Academy training before they go on to the Autobot Academy."

Hound was furious with shame. "I was only looking. I know what I am."

"Wish away then," said Jazz. "Just be realistic."

Defensive, Hound said, "It's more realistic than being allowed audience with Prime."

The group of Alphas began to converse with each other, before casting low glances at the trio. Finally the tallest of the five, left the table and bean to strut in their direction.

"He's coming our way," Hound hissed in barely concealed excitement.

Jazz, rolled his optics, and tried to settle his limbs in some casual, yet friendly configuration. But all he could think of was that this was an Alpha approaching, the sacred caste, when he was a dark planet mech of Insect leanings. Their differences could not have yawned out so wide and terribly.

Automatically he reached for the fold in his armour that held his little icon, offered up a quick prayer to Primus that his meeting would go well.

The Alpha-mech stood in front of them. At his arm was a turbo-fox on a gold chain, a grotesque creature with thick, serrated scales and gleaming pincers that dripped cyb-neural poison.

"Trailblazer."

"Uh, greetings, Warpath." Trailblazer bowed. Warpath did not return the bow, but the turbo-fox hissed at him.

"Who are your... friends?"

"Jazz. Hound." Trailblazer pushed their names out as if they were almost curses. Jazz realised that Trailblazer was uncomfortable in the presence of the Alpha, and equally upset at being here with a pair of dark-planet mechs, reducing his standing.

"Jazz," repeated the Alpha. "Hound." His friends came to join him, equally beautiful and remote.

"You got a turbo-fox" Hound blurted.

Warpath patted the turbo-fox on its head-plates. "I call him Megatron. He may try to fight me, but I am his master."

Megatron the turbo-fox indeed hated his master with all the passion of his namesake. Jazz saw how the silver pincers were actually a pincer-muzzle. Try as he might, the turbo-fox could not stab a fatal blow through Warpath's armour.

Jazz had a sudden, crazy notion to try out his language skills on the Alpha mech. He was fluent in Alpha, but not conversational in that sacred, language, so it was a stab in the dark to say, "I am honored to be in your presence, Alpha Warpath."

He'd said it perfectly, but something in the Alpha's face slipped, a slight tightening of his facial pavements.

"You seem learned for your kind," Warpath returned in Alpha Dialect. "What other mannered tasks can you do? Are you knowledged in Tactical?"

Jazz nodded. He was aware of Trailblazer and Hound staring open-mouthed at him, and Trailblazer's internal comms breaking through Jazz's encryption to say, "_No, don't do it."_

Warpath motioned to the barkeep to bring over a Tactical board and more energon. Jazz didn't want to know what to stare at first, the brilliant white energon in the Alpha's cup, or the Alpha's Tactical board, carved out of diamond plates and palladium columns. The pieces were made of coloured stones.

"Off world," murmured Hound in Insect Dialect. "Cybertron doesn't have a geological process to..."

"I know," said Jazz. Securing anything non-metallic meant a trip to another planet, which meant energy, and credits, and unbelievable cost. This Tactical board alone could feed an entire barge-crew for a year.

Jazz looked up at Warpath's smug face. He didn't know whether the Alpha intended to discourage Jazz by producing such treasures, or just didn't know that to most of Cybertron, such baubles did not exist.

Jazz set up his pieces. He noticed that the Alpha deliberately chose the layout known as The Prime's Victory. It was a classic lay, hard to defeat. A good tactical player could bring them into endless stalemate, pieces exchanged back and forth with no real resolution. An ordinary player would be crushed within the first ten moves.

Jazz read far too much in that opening. He saw the other Alphas looking at Warpath's lay, and giggling among themselves.

_Rust you,_ Jazz thought, crushed. _Rust you. I just wanted to be friendly._

This was not about playing a game. It was about humiliation. Everyone knew it was bad gameplay to open with a too-strong layout. A proper game should start out with two equals. But Warpath had thrown his status in Jazz's face.

"What is it?" said Warpath in Alpha, mocking Jazz's crude accent. "Don't you know how to set up a board?"

The other young Alphas laughed at Jazz. Hound buried his face in his hands.

"Come on," said Trailblazer. "We'd better go."

"Wait," said Jazz. "I'm playing."

His announcements made the Alphas howl with laughter even more.

There was only one way to defeat such a lay, and that was to bring out The Great Lord early, and make him fight.

At the first move, Warpath looked at Jazz in alarm.

The Prime Victory was set to ensure the crushing of pawns, not the mobile Great Lord. Nobody ever brought out the Great Lord into gameplay unless they were suicidal. He was a fortress, an treasure to be kept in your most secure corner. He moved only to save himself.

No time to set up defensive positions, reconnaissance routes or fallback areas. Jazz moved his positions forward in the most brutal of ways. He moved like Decepticons moved, without fear or concern, just a crushing onslaught.

Soon a crowd of mechs had gathered around them. Most soldiers of a certain rank were Tactical aficionados and knew the noble game intimately.

Warpath executed all the proper moves. He was taught like an Alpha would have been, with all the graces and history of his regal race. But he could not defend himself from Jazz's attack.

Finally Warpath's Great Lord was in Jazz's sights.

Only then did Jazz pause. There were strange cyberemones in the air. He suddenly saw what he was. A night-mech with no affiliations, about to show up an Alpha of the highest order. Warpath said nothing, but his little Megatron hissed and dribbled poison.

He exchanged glances with Hound. He was on a terrible fulcrum. Did he dare defeat this Alpha-mech in front of his peers?

Jazz exhaled from his vents. There would be other times to prove himself. This would not be one of them.

He made a move. A clumsy, obvious move, and left Warpath an opening to knock down Jazz's Great Lord.

Warpath did not show any emotion. He only looked at Jazz, a long cool look, then mated with his Lord.

Only silence followed.

"Good win," piped up Trailblazer, and a note of panic laced his voice. "Good game, but of course we can't fault a descendant of Alpha Prime."

Jazz felt a little ill. He didn't want to look at Warpath. He felt the icon in his armour-fold burn him with shame. He had been prideful over a descendant of his god.

The crowd dispersed. Warpath stood up and left without a word.

"Oh Primus," said Hound, "I can't believe you did that."

"Neither can I." Jazz turned to Hound and said vehemently, "But I didn't want to be seen as proof of Autobot decline. I'm as worthy as anyone of going into the Academy. I'm as worthy of being stationed in their barracks. And I will one day serve Prime."

Hound looked over to the Alphas. They were being dressed down by a senior Alpha, a handsome red mech with dark grey armour plating on his head.

"Oh, Perceptor's found them," said Trailblazer. "He's a head instructor at the Academy. Not Autobot affiliated, but few Alphas are affiliated with anything but themselves." Trailbreaker plucked at Jazz's arm. "Let's find somewhere else. Emotions are running far too high here."

* * *

"I saw," said Perceptor, "the most fascinating thing during the eclipse night."

It was no secret that Prowl and Perceptor didn't get along. Perceptor's Alpha rationality and scientific demeanor never sat well with Prowl's hot passions. Prowl was a fighter. Perceptor preferred to study and watch.

But the Alpha councilors had been adamant that one of the Academy instructors should be an Alpha, and despite Perceptor's strict upbringing, moments of friendliness sometimes escaped him.

"Tell me then," mumbled Prowl, only half-listening. "What was this fascinating thing?"

"One of the dark-planet mechs. Destroyed one of my students in a game of Tactical, from a position of Prime Victory no less!"

"He must have cheated," said Prowl off-handedly. Nobody can win from Prime Victory." His attention was on the long list of new recruits collected for pre-Academy training. How had the procurers come up with such a motley bunch? Had the Autobots fallen so far?

"He didn't cheat. I even pulled the memory out of the security files, re-watched the whole thing. He even gave Warpath a victory, which makes him even more clever. He's no show-off. Prowl, the mech is a natural tactician."

Before Prowl could answer, Perceptor nudged him aside, and brought up a name on the viewing screen. The graphic of an Autobot, too foreign and un-Alpha to be pleasing to Prowl, rendered next to his designation - Jazz - and a list of achievements that meant nothing on the sun-side of Cybertron..

"Here. His name is Jazz. He's one of yours."

* * *

Prowl stood on the balustrade of his quarters and looked out over Iacon, looked out in silence the same way the great Warlords must have done, back in the ancient days of Prima and Primon. The domes and minarets of lead crystal sparkled in the sunlight, and in this cool season, the long lengths of yellow metal seemed almost molten.

But despite the golden vision falling upon his optics, Prowl's mood was dark.

Ironhide's comments spun through his processors. The prisoner was right. Nobody would follow their created Prime. Their race would fracture and group under the rough command of true leaders, perhaps someone like this Jazz character.

"You wanted to see me?"

Emirate Xaaron still had a quiet step. Prowl gave him a bow. "Thank you for coming here Emirate. I know it doesn't fit protocol, but I needed to speak to--"

He stopped suddenly. The lean lines of Senator Meridian stepped out from behind Xaaron. His cloak of woven filament flashed as bright as the wing-falls of Nova Prime's had done.

Prowl glanced sideways at Meridian.

"I didn't see you at the unveiling of the Matrix, before," said Meridian. "Does the symbol of our leadership mean so little to you?"

"I had pressing issues," murmured Prowl. Meridian didn't need to hear that Prowl could not stand to watch his Prime being humiliated, that Ironhide's words had bit deep.

"Then speak," said Xaaron, "about these issues, if they were so important."

Prowl stepped forward. There was no delicate way to put it. "We have to send Optimus to the Autobot Academy," he blurted out.

Meridian let out a bark of laughter. "Prime? A warrior's academy? Nonsense!"

However Xaaron did not vouch an opinion straight away.

"Why do you say this, Captain? It seems an terribly odd suggestion."

"We mean for him to fight Megatron. Emirate, Senator, I've trained him well." Too well, he thought to himself, but did not say. "But that will count for nothing if the population, the Autobot Army, does not accept him as true Prime. They need to follow Optimus into battle. Megatron must see this."

"They will follow him because he is Prime," Meridian sneered. "No Prime ever stooped to the baseness of Academy training."

Prowl turned his optics on the Senator. "Is he Prime? Or is he some perverted puppet we have constructed for our benefit? Even now the rumor is that he is monstrous and an abomination. Begging your pardon, but neither of you are listening to the ranks. You don't know what they know, what they hear."

"You would have him go into the Academy," mused Xaaron, "be trained as an officer, like a mere Autobot soldier?"

"No. Like an Autobot Commander. Like a Leader."

Xaaron ignored Meridian's bleats of protest. Perhaps his old circuits were recalling the memory of a different Prime, a different time, a long ago moment.

"Do it," he said. "Train your candidates well. The best ones - they will join Optimus in the Academy."

* * *

(To be continued)


	5. Abundans Cautela

* * *

_**Abundans Cautela Non Nocet Abundant:**_

_Caution does no harm. Thus, one can never be too careful; even excessive precautions don't hurt anyone._

* * *

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Jazz groaned as he rolled out of his berth. The night before sat like a solid mass on his circuits, the memory of drinking more energon in a night that he'd normally have in a whole week.

A voice was screaming at him to get his lazy dark-planet aft off his berth and fall in.

He struggled out of the barracks into the too-bright sunshine and lined up with the other platoon of Academy cadets on the Decagon parade ground, too tired to marvel at being at this pinnacle of their civilization. Hound was beside him, equally under the weather.

A hard old grey mech introduced himself as Kup, and went into a tirade about how of all the mechs he had seen in his days, they were certainly the sorriest bunch, and if any of them were ever to make Academy selection, well, he might as well rip off his head for the shame of it.

A voice behind Jazz muttered in Alpha, "He's got that right."

Warpath, thought Jazz with a sinking feeling. Of all the mechs, he'd had to end up in the same platoon as him.

Kup didn't - or pretended not to - hear Warpath's smart remark, and took them on a lumbering run around the main Decagon circuit. He yelled at them to transform and recover and transform, they did this until their servos were bright with massblood.

Despite the pain, Jazz found it interesting to see what the others chose to take on as their alternative disguises. As a general rule, one would try to emulate an Autophage from your own home city. Warpath and the other Alphas chose the bright creatures from the Iacon high-roads.

Jazz's alt-mode copied the small, pale river-phages that often followed the tributaries of the Cybertron's great River Blood. Kup ran alongside Jazz.

"You'll need to change that alt-mode," he barked. "You'll not find any dark planet Autophage in Iacon. I might as well paint a slagging sign on your aft - I am an Autobot!"

"Yes sir," panted Jazz, "I'll find myself an appropriate alt-mode sir."

"You do that," said Kup.

Their day was not ended after the run was ended. They were taken to the main hall with a crowd of other recruits.

This crowd was larger, a more ragged looking bunch of empties and low-ranked Neutrals who'd given Autobot allegiance. They were mechs headed for the lower ranks of the Autobot forces - cannon fodder.

They watched Jazz as he passed, headed for a cordoned-off area at the front of the hall.

The whispers followed him.

_"Is that a dark planet mech? What is he doing with the Academy prospects?"_

_"He should be here, with us."_

_"He won't make it through. He's just there for show."_

Jazz tightened his jaw and walked on, eyes fixed ahead. They could say what they wanted, but he was here, and he would succeed.

The front of the hall was raised and flanked by the two massive fanes of Primon and Prima.

Jazz looked up at their golden faces, awed now, the little mutters of the Empties forgotten. The first Prime, Primon and his daughter. He was stern and scowling, a while his daughter was much the same, frowning upon these puny mechs in their presence. In Primon' chest was the standard representation of the Matrix, a circle for the body and the laminae folded in an angular patterns like the handle to some object. Yet still, it was the Matrix of Leadership, their living core.

The murmurs in the hall faded as a clean-cut black and white mech made his way to the lectern.

"In Primus' name, I extend my greetings to you all, he said. "My name is Prowl, and I will be your head instructor for as long as you are an Autobot Cadet."

Prowl? Jazz stared up at Prowl and a feeling of great solemnity came over him. Prowl wore the mark of an overseer upon his forehead and had the clipped tones of a soldier, but it was more than that.

Prowl. The Prowl? Second-in-command Prowl?

Jazz was suddenly breathless. He was in the presence of a mech who knew Prime, who had spoken to their god, who had perhaps even shared an intimate conversation, like friends might.

It didn't matter that Jazz was one of hundreds looking up at Prowl, just that the distance between him and God Primus-in-metalflesh had suddenly gone from intangibly vast to as close as a few footsteps.

He reached for his icon, and the light from the crystalline windows fractured into a spectrum of colour, and the hall was filled with brilliance.

_Primus,_ he murmured_. Oh, one day soon, everything will come true._

* * *

After twenty day-cycles of seemingly pointless activity, Kup sorted them into groups.

Jazz realised that in all their running and changing they hadn't merely been doing any ordinary physical work - the drill commander had been examining them for inclusion into a squad.

Later, when he researched the subject on his downtime, Jazz would discover that there was an art and a science in selecting members for a squad. They must not be too alike, for their experience would be limited. Nor must they be too different, or they would never communicate. Weakness and strength needed to be balanced.

While Jazz appreciated this, he was not particularly happy with being placed in a squad with Warpath and three other Alphas, Switch, Portent and Triplex.

A fifth team-member was placed with them, a intemperate mech called Springer who hailed from a twilight city.

Springer was another one of those mechs selected purely to show the lesser castes that there was still a chance for them to succeed. Springer was too self aware not to know that he was a token low-caste recruit for an Academy that never took anyone like him. He completed everything to the allotted time frame, no more, no less.

"Why should I bother doing any more?" Springer said after a timed strip-down-and-rebuild of a gravity bomb.

"But you could do it twice as fast as anyone here!" Jazz exclaimed. He had struggled with his own project, an admittedly more difficult boson-generator, and Springer had lazily completed the bomb in as if he were half asleep.

Springer shrugged a shoulder. He had the broad face of an Insect background, and his jeweled eyes were not pure mech. "Would it make any difference? Mechs like us won't make the Academy. It's not just about how good you are. You have to pass the Council of Alphas, and the Senators. Then you have to be approved by Prime."

"I'm going to make it," said Jazz. "I'll be the best they've seen."

"Well, you just keep deluding yourself. Did you know that in the time of Nova, a dark-planet mech would be killed just for meeting a Prime in the eye? You have to face facts, Jazz, there is too much in the way for you."

With that Springer tossed the gravity bomb at Jazz and walked off.

Last of all they were given Gears, an equally bad tempered Autobot who had failed the Academy course twice before, and was now on his final chance. Gears only looked Jazz up and down as he was joined at the practice firing range.

"You know that only three mechs per squad are chosen for the final rounds?" Gears looked gloomily at the three Alphas expertly marking off the Decepticon dummies. "They're already-approved candidates. I should just give up."

"Only three?" said Jazz.

"It's how they'll whittle the selection down." Gears went back to shooting targets. "And they've already selected for the Academy class, you can guarantee it."

* * *

Prowl flicked through the images on the screen. Two hundred mechs for a class of thirty would-be Autobot leaders.

And Optimus would be among them.

"This is an important class," said Xaaron.

"It may be our last class." Prowl stilled the screen at a dark-planet mech, his muted colours incongruous among the previous bright ones. "I mean look at that. We're scraping the bottom of the tank now. The Decepticons have taken Altihex. We don't even have a true Prime. We are finished."

He pushed himself away from his desk. His own Academy mates were still his closest friends. Now all he had to chose for Optimus were dark-planet slag and uppity Alphas.

Kup pulled the screen to him. "Oh, don't be so certain. This young mech here is one of my best students. He's aced all the fitness and mechanical knowledge tests, and he has made good contacts. He's got a leadership ability I don't see in Alpha Warpath, who is also in his squad."

"Good for you," said Prowl. He made a sour face. The dark-planet mech, this Jazz, had a far-too-pretty face for something meant to be creeping around the slag and slime of the bluecake processing hovels. It upset the order of things, to look like that.

"And good luck in swinging _that creature_ in front of the Council of Alphas. I'm sure they'll love him."

Perceptor moved alongside Kup and nodded in recognition. "I know him! He was the one who beat Warpath in Tactical."

Prowl," said Kup. "it may be time to consider entry into the Academy that bypasses the Alpha Council. Jazz is not the only one. There's two other mechs on that squad alone who would make the grade in any other situation. We are Autobots all, not just Alphas and Insect caste and shadow-siders If we don't start thinking as one, we may as well surrender to the Decepticons now."

"What are you talking about?"

The voice came from the far end of the room, and Senator Meridian strode forward, his Autobot-blue optics flashing.

Prowl sighed at his conflicted feelings. Meridian was still beautiful, with his blue-green colour-nanites so strong, ad that regal face that echoed Primon in his ascendant majesty. Despite his hating Meridian, he would not be averse to spark-sharing with him.

"I cannot believe that you would talk of such heresies as Alphas being like dark-planet mechs," Meridian whined. "Next you will have us thinking that the Decepticons are like us."

Kup bowed his head and hurried out, not wanting to bear the brunt of an Alpha's anger. The Senator looked at Perceptor and Prowl balefully.

"What is this I hear, of you putting Optimus _Prime_-" he sneered the word- "in the Academy? I thought we knew what his destiny was."

"We have to give him all the chances a Warrior should have. He is our Prime after all."

"He will die nonetheless. Besides, the true Primus lineage still exists within the Alpha race. The Matrix is dead. You've seen it yourself."

"And who will take on the mantle of Prime when he goes?" asked Prowl with uncharacteristic coolness for a Beast-Caste. "Senator Fulcrum? Yourself?"

He could see how Meridian's face twitched, how exactly Meridian had thought this.

"Your monster will not be going into the Autobot Academy," he hissed. "Your proposal will be blocked at the Council meeting!"

Prowl drew himself to his full height. He was not as tall as Meridian, but his body still had a warrior's bearing.

"May I remind you, Senator, that the Alphas do not hold a majority in the Senate."

Meridian's face was a mask, but behind those shining pavements, he seethed.

* * *

Each day seemed to blend into another.

Jazz had never before been so up against the wall of his strength and motivation. Every time he thought he could not go further, he made it, one more mini-cycle, one more day, one more league, one more length. His body began to adapt to the new activity, his armor-plates thickening, his mechanics strengthening, his anthro mode tightening up into a hard engine of war.

Not more than a few mechs would nod and murmur at him appreciatively.

He was too tired during downtime to be homesick - one slept when one could - but every so often he was reminded just how far from home he was.

Hound was put into a squad of young Vosians and Tarnians, the few Autobot sympathizers from the now Decepticon-controlled cities. Led by Trailbreaker, they became a tight-knit unit of twilight outsiders, and would rarely be seen apart.

Sometimes Hound would invite Jazz out with them to Autobot City. Hound had recently broke his spark with a pretty whore who was just part-Alpha, Hound's secret desire, and he shyly showed Jazz the star-pattern over his now-exposed spark.

"Good for you, Hound," said Jazz, wry.

"He was perhaps only a quarter Alpha, and illegitimate, but I could feel Primus in him. I could!"

Jazz smiled at his friend, a bittersweet feeling in his spark. It was nice to think of Hound getting his deepest wish, even if only from a back-alley whore. It meant that perhaps Jazz imself might get his wish one day.

He was too weary to think much beyond his far-away meeting of Prime. Not just physically, but emotionally too. Springer and Gears had found each other, and if the gossips would be believed, were lovers. Warpath and the other Alphas always made sly comments about his dark planet body, about things such as dirt and starvation and even - once - about mass sharing, so Jazz felt too nervous to approach any good-looking mech, fearing rejection and hurt.

"I'm glad for you. You've always wanted to make love to an Alpha. But why pay for it Hound?"

Hound became serious.

"If my spark was broken of-centre, or broken wrong, then for the rest of my life I would be marked as someone not deserving of love. One of the Vos Autobots told me that his friend was spark-taken once. After that, nobody would touch him. Who wants to press their spark against something so ugly, so asymmetrical?"

"What happened?" Jazz breathed.

"He went to the smelting pits." Hound looked down, and closed his plates. "It was his choice. I can understand. Who can live without love?"

But the powers that be had made it so their schedules rarely matched, and if they did manage to socialize, Jazz would be worried and anxious about how it would seem, if he was too friendly with Hound's squad. All the squads were pitched against each other in competition for those few Academy places. Their whole lives hinged on the outcome of these days.

Jazz threw himself into his studies instead, and forgot about impossibilities such as love.

One day he had been stripping and cleaning the squad's communal weapons, when he saw a strange mech in the compound.

Almost instantly he realised that it was an Alpha.

He was an Alpha of a higher station than Warpath. He almost seemed to have twice as many colour nanites, so that his armour was iridescent, flashing brilliant green, then blue, such deep and measureless shades it was as if even the photons worshipped him. Jazz could halfway understand Hound's pathetic mooning over the Alpha-lover he could never hope to have.

Warpath was sullen and insolent around his superior, and when the visitor left, Jazz sensed that something of great note had been imparted.

But he had little time to ponder on Alpha business, as always the constant physical activity and tactical warfare lessons, the courses on the history of the Autobots and field medicine, all worked against thinking on anything for any length of time.

Warpath became guarded and polite around Jazz, almost helpful, and Jazz even dared to hope that perhaps they would become squad mates above their station.

Not long after, when their lessons had ended early, and the sun was particularly hot. Warpath came to the secondary barracks.

Oblivious to Hound's stares he invited Jazz outside.

"What can I do for you Warpath?" asked Jazz, cautious. Megatron the turbo-fox was glaring those little hate-filled optics at Jazz, and it made him uncomfortable.

"Jazz, I've been working alongside you as a squad mate for some time now." The words seemed rehearsed, so Jazz stayed silent. "I have since discovered that me preconceptions of you - based on where you were from, on your caste, have been premature."

"Oh," said Jazz, at a loss for words.

"I'd very much like it if you accompanied us to the cool-shafts."

Jazz had heard of them. Quick rushing air created cool underground spaces, but at the time he had yet to find one, or anyone who had the time to show him.

"There's one near here?"

Warpath nodded. "The next few marks will be ultra-hot. There's a lot of sunspot activity. We're going to spend our downtime in the cool shafts. You should come with us. A strong squad is a strong squad. We're all in this together."

"Alright then. I'll just tell Hound-"

"No, wait," said Warpath. "These are Alpha-specific. As much as Hound is your friend. He is Beast Caste."

Jazz didn't like leaving so suddenly, but he knew that he mustn't let this chance at a friendship slide.

He had missed having friends. Although he told himself that he was content enough to get by on his own, he missed the camaraderie of being part of a group. He was a mech whose greatest joy was to please others. It had been a great concern to him that his presence had brought displeasure to the Alphas, when in truth he would have done anything for those descendants of Primon.

It's a pity Gears and Springer couldn't come with us," said Jazz. "We could have had the whole place to ourselves."

"They're probably _sharing_ their downtime," said the other Alpha, Switch.

The comment earned Alpha Switch a hard look from Warpath, before Warpath said, "Springer is seeing Gears in a romantic way, it's true."

"Are relationships allowed in the Academy?"

"Not in the Academy, no," said Warpath a little distractedly. He gave Megatron a tug on his golden leash, and the fox tried to bite Warpath's ankle.

"How did you find him, Warpath?" Jazz asked.

Warpath waved dismissively. "A hunt."

Alpha Switch was more garrulous. "A major hunt. It came down to War and Alpha Mirage, who is the best fox-hunter in all of Iacon. Warpath managed to knock Mirage off the fast-phage he was riding before he could make the shot. All Mirage managed was to take the leg off this critter. The only shot I've ever seen that mech miss."

"I've never heard of this Mirage."

"If you were an Alpha, you would have," snerked Switch. "He will make Senator one day. Not scrabbling about the Academy with the likes of us."

"Enough, Switch," said Warpath.

They walked for several meta cycles. Jazz sniffed the air. It didn't seem to get any warmer or cooler. There wasn't any of the movement associated with the great ventilation shafts of Cybertron.

He began to wonder if they were going to right way.

"Of course we are," said Warpath, when Jazz asked.

"Look," said Jazz, "I'm flattered that you've asked me with you, but I still need some rack time. We have a big run tomorrow, and I don't want to let the squad down by coming last."

Warpath turned on Jazz.

"You've already let the squad down!"

"I'm sorry...?"

"You!" shouted Warpath, "Coming here, thinking you're going to make the Academy. The very though itself is disgusting to our way of life."

"Warpath," said Jazz, "I'm going now."

The Alpha-mech stood in his way.

"You're not going anywhere. You've gone far enough. It's mechs like you who've destroyed Cybertron, made us fall to the Decepticons." Warpath turned his head to spit at the word. "The only thing worse than a dark-planet mech in Iacon is a Decepticon, and both thoughts sicken me."

There was no going around Warpath, only to stand up to him.

"You speak so highly of yourselves, but I could have very easily turned Decepticon." Jazz was toe to toe with Warpath, would not be cowed. "I remained loyal to the Autobots, when they gave us so little. You sit in the sunshine eating energon that falls from the sky, and think you're so much better than us just by virtue of that. Well let me tell you, you're no different that the trader on a dark-end street, thinking you're better than everyone else."

Warpath hit him.

Hard.

Jazz staggered off to one side. He had not expected to be struck. Fighting was forbidden among cadets. It meant instant expulsion.

"So? If you think yourself so righteous, fight back," screeched Warpath. He kicked out with his foot, catching Jazz under the chin.

Jazz tried to roll and cover up. All his circuits were firing, He knew that he had to fight to protect himself, but if he fought a sacred Alpha, a descendant of Primus...

He would not just face expulsion. He would face execution.

As if a command had been given, both Switch and Portent began to kick him from one to the other, not allowing him to stand. Smaller Alpha Trioplex darted in with his sharp fists, catching Jazz on the shoulder, in the face.

"Pax, pax," shouted Jazz. His facial pavements fluttered onto the ground as they were torn away. A foot caught him in the shoulder, tearing off his armour plate, making him scream.

"You know," said Switch, as the Alphas paused for breath above their weeping victim. "I've wondered if his spark is still intact."

Warpath laughed. "They are whores and sluts. He probably has no spark case left."

"He might have no mass left," laughed Portent. "He probably fucked a Decepticon."

It was such a filthy thing to say they all momentarily gasped before laughing, a little uneasily as the subject matter was so offensive. Allowing the mass of a Decepticon to touch and Autobots'? It was beyond obscene.

Caring little for Jazz's cries, Warpath hauled Jazz's chest-plates apart and let out a crow of laughter at what he saw.

"Slagging Primus, the slag-head's a rusted virgin."

The shame went beyond the pain of his broken body, the four Alphas looking at his naked spark and laughing.

"Not for much longer," said Switch, unhooking his chest plates. "I've been thinking of taking extra-curricular lessons in spark interrogation. Jhiaxus has invited me to be an apprentice under him."

There were moments so abhorrent to though and morality that they sucked the strength out of the very air. All Jazz could hear over the warning notes sounding through his body were Hound's words: _He went to the smelting pits. It was his choice._

He would never be able to say where he'd found that last scrap of energy. Not when his energon reservoirs were crushed and broken, not when his face was smeared from massblood, half-blind, his air-intakes crushed. Perhaps it was Primus who guided him.

But his legs came up and struck Switch hard in the chest and he rolled away like a dying turbo-fox, and even Megatron only looked at him with cold fox-eyes, recognizing a common prisoner.

Unable to stand, Jazz slithered away on his own blood, found a gutter meant for condensation and waste and fell into it, and was quickly sucked into a small culvert underneath the tunnel.

He could hear the Alphas screaming for him, Warpath's shouts loudest of all.

But he wriggled on, thoughtlessly, the pain of his injuries almost insurmountable. There was another shaft, a vertical one, where the condensation began to pour away into the deep nothingness, the nowhere and darkness of Cybertron's core.

Weeping, Jazz threw himself into the darkness. It was the pain of death, of his life seeping out of him. It was all his dreams, bleeding away. It was the vision of Prime, looking at his broken body, disgusted at what he saw, walking off, walking away.

He fell.

His journey to the All Spark was fouled by cables, the long capillaries of Cybertron, the transits of Cybertron's energy in and out if the hidden heart of Primus-as-planet. Jazz didn't want to die here, dangling in nothingness. He wanted to die close to Primus, his Prime.

_Help me Primus,_ he prayed. _Help me follow my path to you._

Primus was close to him tonight, the closeness that only death brings.

He used the last of his energy, untangled himself from the cables.

One seemed to be attached to a counterweight, and his fall was more controlled now. He landed upon the lip of a small opening.

From far above, the voices shouted down to him.

Perhaps he was afraid they would follow, for the declined to stay in the shaft, and wriggled towards the opening, the place of pale yellow light.

He knew that he was in a chamber now, some big, empty space. He knew it but did not care to know more. His sensory organs were beginning to shut down, one by one.

He could sense Primus here. He knew it, in his deep unbroken spark.

Not so far away was an open topped box, and a haphazard pile of glowing white gels. The light they case was brighter than that of the glow tubes.

Jazz stared at the box and its contents.

"Primus," he croaked.

White energon, forbidden to all by Alphas and Primes. White energon, meant only in the tiniest most delicate amounts. Jazz grabbed one handful and shoved it into his mouth, followed it by another until he almost seemed to implode in light and in injuries burnt through into the very fabric of time and space, gorged until his strength left him, and he smashed into unconsciousness.

* * *

_TBC..._

* * *


	6. Non ducor, duco

* * *

_**Non ducor, duco**_

_I am not led; I lead_

* * *

.

.

.

Hunger woke Jazz up again. A good clean hunger, not the pain of his injuries. Somewhere between his passing out from energon overload, and waking up, his repair systems had kicked in. He was a long way from fixed, but he was a long way from dying, too.

He'd not managed to digest all the energon. It surrounded him in a puddle with his massblood, dribbled down his chin and over his ruined chest. Groaning, he reached for more from the box, stuffed it into his mouth. His body responded in pleasure. The repair systems got back to work.

Little wonder, he thought, that a Prime could be made, raised on a diet of white energon. Whomever had collected these stolen lozenges had access to the deepest of Iacon's mysteries.

Now that he felt better, his optics resolved some of his surroundings. The chamber was not as big as a hall, but could certainly hold a dozen large mechs comfortably. The ribbed undersides reminded Jazz of the internals of a energon barge, unadorned and stark.

Not a meeting place then, because the difficulty of getting mechs in an out worked against the structure. More likely a void created by an Early Autophage nest, a space not subsumed by the tectonics of Cybertron.

Metal-dust whispered across the ground. Jazz saw the trace of recent disturbances, one set of footprints converging around a glow-tube.

As he approached, wincing and tender, he noticed that small objects had been laid out carefully. Nothing worthwhile. Just a collection of odd things. A book-plate, that when turned revealed a sparkchild's morality story narrated in the Alpha Dialect. A dented dish carved with Primon's face, a broken dagger, a turbo-fox pincer on a platinum chain. And something that resembled a fork or a hook, perhaps a medical device.

Jazz took up the hook. The remains of massblood still silvered the end. He tasted it carefully, but all the aromatics and chemicals were gone.

But it was the wall ahead of him that held the greatest wonder.

Jazz pulled in a breath.

A shrine.

But no ordinary shrine. At first he did not recognize the figure who stood in the center. The Matrix in the figure's centre was no symbolic representation. It was like Jazz's own icon, flowering and alive.

The face belonged to Prima.

Startled, Jazz made a circle on his chest, and knew at last where he was. This was the oldest of old places, a secret temple to Prima. When the Warlord Alpha Duex had taken over Cybertron, Prima had kept their race alive in tiny places, in hidden places. This must have been one of them. The handful of mechs not given over to the terrible cult of the No-Spark would have come here, carried out the worship of their Prime in secret, keeping the desperate flame alive.

Prima had come back from nothingness to take back her planet. In some ways - and this was a heresy almost - Prima had been a stronger leader than her parent, who had never been challenged.

"Oh," whispered Jazz, knowing he should turn his head, and knowing that he could not. Prima had always been portrayed as a reduced shadow compared to Primon. Never like this, so strong, so full of challenge, with the Matrix so prominent. This place was sacred. The dark-planet mech in him quailed. He wanted to prostrate himself and worship. A relic of his Prime, his Prime.

Quickly, he looked around. Somebody was still using the little grotto. He shouldn't be here.

But the sighing and muttering of Cybertron's depths did not echo another living thing.

Besides, thought Jazz, the collection of offerings was haphazard, not like something a priest or prophet might use. More likely sparkchildren of the Celestial Temple servants were creeping through the tunnels and playing here, although the footsteps suggested someone whose armour was adult-hard.

He gave a guilty, sideways glance at the now-empty box of white energon. He had stolen from them, eaten from an emergency cache. Even though they had probably stolen the white energon from the same place they'd pilfered the Alpha cutlery and the Alpha books, the theft was not morally mitigated. Jazz knew he would have to make amends.

Prima gave Jazz an accusing look from her far wall. The Matrix seemed to move in the organic light of the glow-tube.

"Thank you Prima, for your gift," he said, making the circle-sign on his chest once more. "I'll bring the energon back. I promise."

* * *

Finding a way out of the old temple was not easy. His energy reservoirs had not completely repaired themselves, and he was too weak to consider scaling his way back up the cables in the conduit.

Patient searching revealed the likely path that the old priests would have taken, and the route Prima's casual visitor took, more cables inside another arterial shaft, but this time attached to a series of counterweights.

When he took hold of one cable, he fell several lengths before managing to stop himself.

_Up, not down!_

Jazz grabbed hold of a second cable, and he shot up the shaft at a dizzying speed, close to the terminal velocity of the counter-weight.

Jazz clung on tight. He had always been a surface-mech. He didn't like confined spaces. Despite his small size, he was afraid of impaling himself on the jagged spines lining the shaft, becoming trapped, bleeding and starving into a husk.

The shaft ended at a tertiary conduit. Jazz's geolocation systems blipped. He was almost directly under the Celestial Temple. He smiled to himself, still sparking with the vision he had seen. Could it be possible, that even Prima herself had once hidden in that very space he had recovered in? The theory was not so crazy. When Alpha Duex attacked the Celestial Temple with his army, the only logical escape for a young Prima would have been straight down.

It was such a glorious thought, and a thought Jazz would need to hold on to with all his strength, for he was going to have to make his way back to the Decagon and the Alphas who had tried to kill him. He would have to go back as if nothing had happened, that he had just been careless and forgotten that he needed to attend class, although he didn't know how many classes he had missed.

He would be punished, of course, that was a given.

But he would take it. He had to.

A moving transit-way was grinding down a secondary tunnel, and he stepped upon it the same time as a pair of side-scuttling servants. Laden with smoked-out glow tubes, they paid him no notice.

* * *

They'd always said that he should have been an oracle. It had been a running joke when he'd been younger, and still allowed to fight. Even Nova Prima had remarked on Prowl's skill to _just-avoid_ catastrophe.

"I would hazard a guess that this is why you're so taciturn," Nova said to Prowl once. "To know the future is to be devoid of hope, and that would put any mech into a foul mood."

Prowl knew himself that he wasn't really blessed with precognition. I he did he would not have dared to hope that one day Nova might call him to his berth the way Nova called Jhiaxus. He would have never wished to share his spark with his Prime. But he had a sense of coming disaster, and there was something looming in his foresight, something terrible.

He felt it that morning-cycle, as Optimus fought off his _four_ attackers now - (Perceptor had reprogrammed the fight simulator) - with his normal insouciance. Just when it seemed Optimus had cornered them and was about to behead them all, he made a clumsy feint and caught a painful holo-blade in the chst.

Perceptor had turned up the cyb-neural feedback too, so the pain made Optimus reel back slightly, before he recovered and looked at Prowl.

Prowl felt himself quirk an almost-smile. Optimus' face was his only weakness. There was no hiding the challenge there. Crafty mech!

His smile faded as he remembered Ironhide's words, _Tell me Prowl, do you ever look upon that Monster Prime of yours with something more than fraternal duty? Do you ever wish that you could lie with him the way Nova never did with you?_

Suddenly he felt a lurch of sickness, at the thought of Optimus being used in that way. He knew he needed not to think of Optimus in anything but the cool thoughts of a trainer, but every once in a while, a harrowed affection. He was only a sparkchild under all his adult armour.

They were going to kill him.

"Wash up now," said Prowl tightly. "You will have an audience with the Council later."

"Do I need to show the Matrix to them?" Optimus was guarded whenever he spoke of his task.

"No, not this time. We're going to discuss your future."

"What future?" Optimus frowned now. For him life was a constant cycle of - and Prowl knew that he was part of it - fighting and pain and humiliation. What future indeed.

"I cannon train you alone. You've not been outside of the Celestial Temple and..." He stopped. This was the news that Emirate Xaaron had to give, not him. "Well, you'll find out. Now go. Polish up, I want you looking your best."

Optimus threw him an inscrutable look before leaving.

His next assignment did little to help his growing disquiet. There was a minor drama in the tactical class, when one of the AWOL students decided to make a reappearance.

Prowl saw that it was the dark-planet one that Perceptor seemed to think so highly of.

He looked beaten and bedraggled, amour plates hanging off him in odd angles, stinking of massblood and too much energon, the smell of the whores who fought in the tunnels and drank themselves to a stupor on street-corners.

Prowl almost ordered him out, and would have done so, if his second sense hadn't loomed up upon him like a time-displacement shockwave.

He'd completed the lesson, noting how Jazz's Alpha squad mates shot dagger-glares at him, and Jazz shivered, his repair systems working in overdrive.

Finally he ordered the miscreant to visit the medics and report to Kup for questioning and discipline.

"This is why we don't have dark planet mechs in the Academy, Prowl said to Kup later. "They cannot be trusted to keep time or even follow instructions."

Kup shook his head. "You've been spending too much time in the perfumed halls of the Alphas, Prowl. You ever think that they think the same of you, a Beast Caste mech pretending he's an equal to them?"

Nobody else but Kup or Ironhide would have dared say such a thing to Prowl.

"So," said Kup, "Are you going to stay with me while I talk to my soldier?"

Prowl gave a quick gesture in the negative. "I have to accompany Optimus to the Council. Today they're going to assess his suitability to join the Autobot Academy."

Kup must have heard the uncertainty in his voice, as he gripped Prowl's shoulder. "The decision is a good one."

"I cant help thinking that I'm being bullied into it," said Prowl, "By Ironhide's comments, by my own slagging softness. If I were still able to fight I could approach this problem as a soldier, but I'm no better than the courtiers that infect the hallways."

Kup let him go.

Prowl almost fled the Decagon. His feet beat out a quick tattoo on the metal surface of the Decagon's main corridor. His mind was filled with portents and worries.

"Why are you moving so fast, on such a fine day as this?"

The daylight didn't suit Elita. All the changes she had made to her body only made her hideous in the light. She was more suited to skulking in the shadows.

"I'm busy now, Elita," Prowl hissed. "You'd bet get back to your Underhalls before anybody sees you."

She only stood in his way.

"Ah, you're feeling it too. That potentiality, that something awful is about to happen? Yes? But what you think? Are we about to be attacked by Megatron's forces? Is a terrible calamity about to befall us?"

Prowl pushed her aside. He could sense her grinning behind him, her sharpened teeth glinting in the sunlight.

"Give your Prime my regards," she cried out after him.

* * *

It was in this annoyed mood that he made it into the High Council chambers.

Optimus had been brought in, and sat at the far end of the table like a naughty sparkchild about to get punished. The time was past since he used to cower there, barely able to speak. Now he was quiet and as watchful as a turbo-fox.

_It won't just be the leader we'll be making of him,_ thought Prowl,_ but the Mech as well. A life without love or affection will turn him brutal. He'll need to know camaraderie, to work in a team._

_He'll need these things before he dies._

Prowl tried to sort out his arguments, and found that he was nervous in making them before Optimus. For all that he had been taken from the dark-planet, Optimus' body was still that of Nemesis Prime, Nova's parent. There was enough of Nova in him to put an ache into Prowl.

Emirate Xaaron's words seemed to come as if from a distance. Prowl heard him put the proposal forward to the Council in low-fidelity, echoes and static. There were shouts of concern from some corners, agreements from the others, and leading the dissention was Senator Meridian, appealing to the great Alpha pride.

In all of this Optimus watched them, far more intelligent and calculating than any of them knew.

Prowl wanted to go to his side say, "But what is your opinion? What do you want to do?"

He could not. Optimus had no voice. The dying Matrix in his chest would not speak.

So he spoke on Optimus' behalf.

"The fact that even now, as we argue among ourselves, says that we have no leader. Megatron will see him as a mere pit fighter set against him. Megatron will know. I do not wish to waste a life, or our legacy."

_Give him a moment to live. Give him a moment to be normal._

The Council retired to deliberate. Prowl took Optimus into an adjoining room. Optimus often revealed the Matrix here. Even now he steered clear of the alter at the far end, and quietly stepped through some Metallikato forms with an imaginary sword.

"Optimus? Do you understand what they are asking of you in there?"

Optimus did not answer until he finished his form, then said quietly, "They intend for me to go to the Autobot Academy."

"This was my suggestion. I didn't want you spending the last of your life--"

Optimus gave prowl a sharp look, and Prowl realised what he had said. "I meant--" Prowl stumbled about.

"I know what you meant," said Optimus. There was always that intense weight to him, as if even living was a terrible thing to endure. "I know that I am meant to fight Megatron. I know this is what you have been training me for."

Prowl was sick of lies. He couldn't lie to Optimus.

"Nobody can win against him. He is stronger than any Autobot, than anyone. He is a force of nature himself." The pain in his spark was grief-pain. "He will kill you."

"Yes," said Optimus.

"If it could be different, if I could make it that you didn't have to-"Prowl felt a wave of panic come over him, same as he had felt when Nova had died, "If I could do something to stop it..."

He had never shown such emotion, his true feelings, to Optimus before.

But Optimus only watched him in silence.

"But I welcome that time," said Optimus. "For me it cannot come soon enough."

He touched his chest, the plates over the Matrix, his eternal pain, and Prowl had to restrain himself from crying out.

If he had more to say, their time was over. A Temple Guard stood at the door.

"It is time. They have made their decision."

As he stepped back into the High Council chamber Prowl saw Meridian's face. The warning feeling crystallized into words. _Watch him. You've made him lose face, and now he'll want to pay you back._

"We have decided," said Xaaron.

Xaaron didn't need to say anymore, not really, and was in those same muted and faraway tones that Prowl heard him outline the terms and conditions of Optimus' final schooling.

When it was over, Prowl declined the use of a guard, and walked alone with Optimus back to their part of the Temple.

The quality of Optimus' silence was different now. Prowl tried to get him into a conversation, but the big mech was having none of it. Now that Optimus was fixated on death, Prowl's instinct was to be ever so slightly repulsed.

Prowl decided that he would find himself a berthmate tonight. There would be a gathering of Alphas in the Iacon Towers, a stepping-out event of young soft-shells. Prowl wanted to taste innocence in hard kisses, so see in a young mech's face the quickening of first-pleasure, the delight of overload for the first time. Wanted that, rather than having to endure Optimus' constant suffering.

As they approached the Prime Quarters, Prowl noticed a group of mechs lurking out the front. He recognised Meridian's body-servants, and one of Perceptor's assistants. There were also a trio of Temple Guards.

The assistant gave a gasp on seeing them approach, and ducked inside.

Wondering what the All-Spark was going on, Prowl strode on ahead. What were the servants doing here uninvited? They were not allowed to be gawping at the Prime Quarters as if it were some Dead End sideshow.

"What in Primus' name is going on here...?" he started, then stopped.

Meridian turned, his blue titanium cloak striking tiny musical notes across the hard ground.

"About time you arrived," said Meridian. "I didn't want to bring this up at the Council meeting. Not everyone is privy to our issues."

Prowl threw a glance towards a miserable-looking scientific assistant.

Meridian took a memory-crystal from his flank, threw it so that it landed at Optimus' feet.

Optimus didn't move to pick it up. Prowl knelt and knew what it was as soon as he rolled the red-hued glass between his fingers. It was the memory-core from the fight simulator.

"What are you doing with this?"

"As you know, Prowl, you are not the only one charged with keeping the Matrix and our Legacy safe," said Meridian. "We can be attacked from without and-" a hard look at Optimus, "Within."

The danger-feeling rose. "Optimus," said Prowl, "Go to my berth-room. Wait there."

"No," said Meridian, and he summoned the guards with a wave of his hand. One stood before Prowl, the other two in front of Optimus.

Prowl knew that all he needed to do was give the word, and Optimus could kill everyone in this room with his bare hands. He'd done it before in the fight simulator, the one whose memory he now held.

"I noticed some discrepancies with Optimus' learning curve," Meridian had a pleasant sound to his voice, but his face was as glassy-smooth as polished steel. "Then I realised we were being purposefully mislead as to the speed of his development."

Prowl shuttered his eyes. This was it. _Oh Primus, no._ He opened them again. "I was aware."

"Come now, Prowl. You know that you were being misled by your charge here, and allowed yourself to be. You have been emotionally compromised. You no longer have the strength to enact discipline where it needs to be enacted."

"What are you talking about?"

"He needs to learn who are his masters!" shouted Meridian. He raised a finger at Optimus' face. "He needs to know that lies and deceit will not go unpunished!"

Optimus' gaze swung between Meridian and Prowl, imploring.

A protective step towards Optimus, and the guard's spear was in Prowl's chest, warning him to go no further. Optimus clenched his great fists - Prowl shook his head at him. Whatever was going to happen, it would be worse if Optimus was seen as trouble.

"Emirate Xaaron will not like this," growled Prowl.

"Think, Prowl. It was the Emirate's idea."

Perhaps not without much goading and lobbying, thought Prowl. For a long time.

Meridian continued, "Until he goes to the Academy, I am to be his new instructor and teacher."

"And what will you teach him?" Prowl was so livid he was ready to melt out of his armour. "You are not fighter. You have never seen a battle."

"I will teach him protocol. I will teach him respect. I will teach him not to lie."

He looked at Optimus too quickly, and Optimus saw the naked panic on Prowl's face. Without warning one hand swung up and caught the Temple Guard on the shoulder, flinging him aside, the other only barely managed to slam a blade in between Optimus' armour plates at his side where they were thinnest, the shaft broke off and Prowl could hear himself screaming, or was it Meridian, yelling, the Matrix the Matrix.

Then something snaked out from under Meridian's robes, something long and blue-white with electrical arcs, filling the air with ozone. It snaked up and caught Optimus across the thighs.

Prowl had never known anyone to have been struck by an electro-whip. By all accounts the pain was intense, more that a sentient creature could bear without going mad.

They only used it on throttle-bots, those permanently under-clocked creatures that exceeded the "golden size",

Optimus let out a sharp, strangled sound and fell to his knees. Prowl smelt burnt armour.

"Oh, so you remember this, do you?" shouted Meridian. "It is a device that overseers use upon the barge-loaders and the Autophages. Your disgusting body has come from the Pit, and it will be a device from the Pit that will be your friend and your guide."

Optimus must have given Meridian a look that displeased him, for the whip struck out across Optimus' back.

_"No,"_ screamed Prowl. The Temple Guards pushed him away

Optimus toppled to his face, his sparkchild's optics swimming with unbridled fear and insurmountable agony. Meridian struck him again, laying a blackened path marked with silver.

Optimus keened, a defeated vocalization that went beyond language. Prowl sobbed, almost in an embrace with the massive guard who held him back. "No more Meridian. No more..."

"Remember this pain, _Prime_," said Meridian, ignoring Prowl's pleas. "It will be the pain that awaits you if you attempt to stray off your chosen path. It will be the pain that will come when you try to keep secrets from us. Remember it well."

And as if to ram home his message Meridian lifted his arm and brought down the electro-whip, again and again and again...

* * *

_**TBC...**_

* * *


	7. Dura lex, sed lex

**DURA LEX, SED LEX**

(The law is harsh, but it is the law)

.

.

.

* * *

.

.

.

He staggered into his barracks, starving.

Hound was lounging on his berth, reading a manual on muon decay in interstellar messaging. The bright pixels lit up the planes of Hound's slightly askew face, made him seem frosted over, as if he'd ossified in the long wait for Jazz's return.

Then Jazz's shadow fell over the screen, and Hound nearly fell off his berth.

"Oh, in the name of No Spark, how... what...?" The screen blinked and shorted.

"Energon," pleaded Jazz. "Energon..."

"Yeah, sure, hold on."

Hound found an empty cube next to the reservoir, fixed him a double ration, flinched when Jazz snatched it out of his hand. The energon smeared over Jazz's face, dropped on his ruined armour.

"Are you all right?" Hound asked. He sounded nervous, uncertain of the wild mech staggering into the barracks unannounced.

"Primus," gasped Jazz, flinging the empty cube away.

The foam recharge pad on Jazz's berth had already been rolled up and away. Hound's shoulders sagged as he saw the wounded expression on Jazz's face.

"They thought you had gone AWOL," Hound explained. "You're already off the list. Oh sweet Primus, did you put yourself through teeth and cogs to look like that?"

"I was attacked," growled Jazz. The energon had foamed at the corners of his mouth, making him look mad. "I was lured away like some foolish sparkchild."

"Who? Who would attack an Academy Prospect?"

Jazz gave Hound a bleak look, and Hound found the answer, found it and could not comprehend it. _No_. Autobots would never attack Autobots. Not now. Not when the Decepticon forces massed at the Iacon walls.

"What are you going to do?" Hound asked. "Go back home to Stanix? The city is almost completely Decepticon controlled."

Jazz picked up the cube from where he had thrown it, and stacked it by the reservoir. He stroked the sunlit surface. Stanix. His home. His respect. All gone now, eroded just like Autobot authority over Cybertron.

"You think I should go back?"

"I don't know what to think, Jazz. You've missed so many classes."

Jazz unrolled his sleeping pad, and nodded when he saw the lariat that strung the security passes together.

"Well I'm not going back. I'm not!"

"Easy, Jazz, okay. Don't get angry with me."

Jazz picked up the passes. They caught the light of the reservoir, reflected the glow in his optics. "I'm going to go to my class, talk to Prowl. I'm going to get back in."

* * *

"Is this going to be a problem Cadet Jazz?" asked Kup. "Am I going to be seeing you in this situation again?"

Jazz shook his head, somewhat unconvincingly. "Sir, no sir." His words were muted. The colour nanites had been sloughed off his cheek from a fist, the bright metal now oxidizied into dullness.

Kup studied the young mech before him. A lifetime of fighting had made him more than able to tell who had been the aggressor and who had been the victim. Dents and scuffs along the inside forearms were defensive wounds, hands held up to ward off blows. This was no matched fight. He'd been set upon, by many.

"Who did this to you, soldier?"

Jazz's jaw seemed to be welded shut. The gaze was faraway, a soldier on the edge of his strength.

Stubborn little mech. Prowl had not been terribly amused to have some no-hoper of a Prospect reappear in the middle of a Tactical class. "This is why we don't have dark planet mechs in the Academy," Prowl had growled into Kup's audios. "They cannot be trusted to keep time or even follow instructions."

Prowl had declined to stay for the outcome of the disciplinary hearing. Kup understood. He knew that Prowl was having problems, with the Alpha Council, with Senator Meridian, with the new Prime and his own conflicted self.

Now he stood in his office and looked at Jazz.

_Ah, if I were a younger mech of an equal rank_, thought Kup, _I may have stepped out with this one. He has such an exotic attraction to him. Better off a whore than a soldier. Better off doing here what the other dark planet refugees do._

"I know who did this to you, Jazz."

There was no reply.

"You think I have needlessly punished you, by putting you in a squad with Alphas?"

Now he would see what this youngster was made of. Jazz gave Kup a look, naked anger and puzzlement, all smelted together. Despite and the gravity of the conversation, Kup crooked a grin.

"So I've hit the button, soft-shell. Well then, think me cruel. But if you think some unranked cadets are unbearable, you need to learn that _now_. Not under gunfire. Not when the might of the Decepticon Army is upon you."

The optics that met his were confrontational. There was still fight left in the young turbo-fox. Jazz growled, "Why say this when no shadow-side mech has ever made it to the Academy? If I'm to be made an example of, why continue this charade?"

"None have made it to the Academy - yet. Which does not mean that they won't."

"The decision has already been made, sir."

Kup quirked a metal-brow. "Oh, you think?"

"The Alphas have already been chosen by rote to enter the Academy. That's half the squad."

Kup clicked, "There is no self pity in you, Jazz. You don't whine about your station. If you knew this, you would have left a long time ago. And yet you still turned up here today, offered to take your punishment like a mech. This is a good trait."

"Am I to be discharged?" asked Jazz. "Or can I re-join my place as a Cadet Prospect?"

Kup shuffled some names about of the plasma screen before him. "I cannot let you back in straight away. For all that you had reason, you have still gone AWOL. In a situation of war, this would be unforgivable."

"Dismissal then."

"Not yet. You will be assigned to an alternative duty for a time, then we will see if you are able to re-join your unit for the last semester."

"Sir?" Jazz was puzzled.

"I am sending you to the Decagon Prison."

Jazz could not stop the word from bursting out of him.

"No."

"_Yes_, Jazz. Either that, or leave."

* * *

The walls seemed to close in around him. Only the dregs of Autobot ranks and soldiery were sent down to manage the prisons. He would be back in the darkness. The stink of the dungeon would seep into his colour-nanites. He would become one of them, used only to the harsh moralities of coercion and prison life.

"But, how will I learn? How will I be able to reintegrate myself?"

"There are more ways to learn than by sitting in a classroom," Kup had said. "I've seen your results. You are gifted in language. You can glean information from the most various sources. You can still remain on campus if you wish, but you will work in the prisons. You will learn as if you were learning in war. Then come back to us and we will see how worthy you are."

Now, as the elevator descended into the deep underhalls of Decagon Jazz fumbled for his Matrix-icon, held it in his still-sore fist. An awful sense of despair was drowning him. A stint as a prison guard would forever remain on his record. He would be forever tainted with impurity.

The emptiness seemed to spiral up and away into a great crushing vortex. Primus was gone from him, his god, his greatest wish. Now all he could think of was Warpath's face, sneering at him in place of Primus' own.

What made it worse was that since his miraculous return Warpath had accessed Jazz's personal files. Warpath's Alpha-codes gave him access to everything, even the psychological profiles from an early interview.

"What a surprise! You are going to be a prison-vermin," Warpath had crowed. The Alpha-mech had cornered him while he waited at the elevator station, his shell pack in his hand.

The other Alphas had laughed. If Warpath could not destroy Jazz physically, he would do it mentally.

Warpath had grabbed Jazz's arm, hauled him close. His words were hissed in Alpha, the high and sacred dialect of their god.

"Vermin. Slag. You will never become an Academy Cadet. You will never see Prime. You will never stand before him. Your god will never look at you. It will be as if you had never existed."

Jazz had pulled away, saved only by the call of the little mech who operated the elevators. He wanted to snap something back, words to negate all that Warpath had said. But the truth was like a sword into his spark. It drained the strength out of him.

As the elevator descended he leant against one wall, as destroyed as if Warpath had beat him again.

* * *

Jazz could smell the prison even before the elevator stopped. A miasma of darkness and rotting protoflesh, hateful cyberemones, and a curious stink that could only be the trace elements of Decepticons. His body recoiled. He had only ever seen a Decepticon from a distance, had caught a waft of their cyberlogical poison in the air, a single minded madness like an insect swarm.

He was reminded of Warpath's sly insinuation, that he had perhaps shared his mass with a Decepticon. Even now he had almost vomited his last energon meal at the image the words brought, thought of his bodymass sliding into corrupted flesh.

All these ideas brought the despair upon him, twice as bad as before.

The nausea settled as the doors opened, and Jazz steeled himself. He was hit by an unexpected heat, a furnace blast of hot air that assaulted him as soundly as a fist. Where there were no walls, wide rivulets of smelting pits and curtains of molten metal spread out across a great cavern. The hollow space that almost seemed to accommodate the curve of Cybertron for its size. The effect was so much like the dark side of Cybertron and the River Blood that Jazz was stilled by the visual dissonance between knowing where he was and what his eyes saw.

"You Jazz?"

Jazz turned around, saw a largish 'bot in white and red livery, a black overseer's chevron over a face that was pure mech.

"Yes."

A moment where he was looked up and down, an uncomfortable moment where he knew he was being assessed, and for all that he would be from now on, no matter how hard he worked, this mech's opinion would only encompass this brief few seconds.

"Well. You look strong enough. Come on then."

Not even an introduction. Jazz ran after the white mech, clutching his shell case close. A hundred optics watched him pass, a hundred beaten, angry, vengeful optics, smelling the sunlight on him.

As he walked, he noticed that the white mech had a small grey sash around his neck. Jazz almost stumbled in surprise. A stasis band. This mech was a prisoner.

"I can smell you looking at me."

"You're a... an... inmate?" He didn't know how to put it delicately.

"I am a guest of the Autobot council, yes."

They walked over a long suspended bridge. Far below the smelting pits were glowing like a Decepticon's optics. The pitiful voices of the imprisoned and tortured mechs rose up in a cacophony.

"Oh Primus," stammered Jazz, "what did you do to end up here?"

Midway across the bridge the white mech stilled and turned to face Jazz. The dull red of the smelting pits turned his pale body into a sickly orange colour. Those quick blue optics saw Jazz fondle his amulet, saw the flash of the radium crystal.

The smile was broad and terrible.

"My name is Ratchet. I am here for the crime of Primicide. Attempted of course, but next time I won't fail."

"Primicide..."

He left Jazz on the bridge, sick with horror, surrounded by the cries of the worthless and the condemned. Primicide. Ratchet had tried to kill Prime.

* * *

A visitor had come to the Celestial Temple. He came unadorned, only with two retinue members, Decepticons of a high rank.

By the way the council reacted, you would have thought Megatron himself had arrived. But it was Megatron's Second that offered to parley, a green and gold Insect caste mech who went by the name Infest. It was a name made holy by previous holders of the name, individuals loyal to Prima, individuals who had fought for the Autobot cause.

But this Infest was a Decepticon, and he was loyal to nobody but Megatron.

Surrounded by temple guards, Infest tilted his head at Prowl. "This is hardly a diplomatic welcome." His Autobot was impeccable.

Prowl glared at Infest and his unannounced visit. He was still hung-over from the cycle before. Two soft-shells he had bought to his berth, and had made love to them with an intensity that had frightened them. They both looked like Meridian, both Alphas. And each time he plunged his spark into the new-broken cup of a spark-case he could not erase from his mind Optimus' screams.

In the end he'd needed to send them away, and drank unprocessed energon until his mouth felt scoured out with steel wool and the room spun.

Infest now gave Prowl a dismissive look, and even waved away Emirate Xaaron as he attempted to speak.

"I am here to talk to your Prime, not his underlings. You have a Prime, do you not?"

Emirate Xaaron leant on his staff. "Our young Prime is indisposed."

Infest leered. "Rumor is, you have no Prime. Or at least, some golem, some contraption animated like a puppet. A disgusting thing, leaking dead massblood, a decayed corpse hauled in from the Dark. Is that not right, Lord Prowl?"

"Prime does not speak with the likes of you," Prowl hissed. "You speak with me and I will give him your message."

"Oh-ho! The likes of me! Tell me, is it the likes of me as a Decepticon, or the likes of me as an _Insect_." When Prowl did not immediately reply, Infest continued. "Foolish Autobots, you wonder why we have captured the loyalty of so many cities. It rusts you all to pieces as you try to understand. But can you not _see_, you fools? Megatron accepts all to his presence, from the low to the high. We have no rank. We are all as one."

_Well, that is so much slag,_ thought Prowl, for he knew that unstable, brutal Megatron had his favorites and rewarded them accordingly.

"Give me your message," said Prowl, and try as he might, he could not keep the beaten weariness from his voice. It was as if he were acting out a part that had been written for him, a messenger for the end of his people, for the end of all days. "I will see that Prime receives it."

"Tell your Prime - if you have one - that Megatron waits for him, and will accept a surrender. Perhaps you may be able to save your temple and your dying religion. But take care you send us a Prime for this task. Send us a dummy or a decoy, try to fool us with a corpse... Lord Megatron will raze Iacon to the ground. _To the ground_, Lord Prowl."

"Is that all?"

Infest smirked, the grin of someone who knew they had already won. "That is all."

* * *

Ratchet, it turned out, was a medic, and more than that, a fully trained surgeon and repairbot. Despite his crime, despite the hammerstrike of dismay and revulsion that Jazz felt every time he looked at the white mech, there was no doubting that Ratchet was easily one of the best Jazz had ever seen.

For his first shift, Jazz was asked just to watch and assist. A line of prisoners and guards alike queued for repair, and Ratchet treated them all with a stoic, unjudgemental manner. Jazz saw how even the most wound-up and destructive of individuals would relax in the medic's presence, as if they knew he would bring no harm.

The experience, even on that first day, was a revelation. In the course of the cycle Jazz learnt more about field medicine that he's done in all his time in the Stanix security patrols. He watched in awe as Ratchet bolted armour back on, filled the most terrible wounds, opened chests and welded together broken sparks.

Near the end of the long shift, Jazz was given a list of equipment on a piece of cellulose shoved into his hand.

Jazz fingered the unusual material. "Some of these things are prohibited. Nanite mesh. An armour drill. This stuff here too, this could be made into an incendiary weapon."

"You will get them for me." Ratchet was severe.

"You mean smuggle them in? Ratchet, if I'm caught, I'll end up in here with you!"

Ratchet turned away, and it was then that Jazz noticed how little equipment Ratchet had in his medical rooms. Use-once equipment was being re-used a dozen times. Blades had been sharpened until they were sliver-thin.

"_Primus_. All right."

Back on the surface, Jazz was grateful that Hound was not in the barracks. A patina of prison-grime had settled over him like a layer of destructive nanites, and not even a meta-cycle in the showers could remove the slime and stench.

As he rolled into his sleeping foam, he left a trail of smelter-grit.

Dirty, unclean, he lay on his berth and looked up at the roof, and the long tiresome day laid its final hand over his weary body. He remembered Kup saying that he had no self-pity, and knew that Kup was wrong. Self-pity was the only thing he could feel now, with his future uncertain and his dream dashed and dying. He clung to his amulet, turned off his optics, and wept himself to recharge-sleep.

He did not hear Hound come in and pull the thin anti-static coverlet over him, but realized it when he woke. Jazz looked over at his friend. He knew that he would not now be able to know the simple pleasure of Hound's company. If he was too close, the Alphas would target him too. Hound's life and dreams were just as much in danger.

Jazz collected his sleeping roll and the few items of Ratchet's list, hid them in the foam. Far better if he remained in the prison instead.

Before he left, he took a guilty look at the energon reservoir, remembered the white energon he had taken from the little cache in the Prima-shrine. Its owner would come, would find it missing. He imagined a soft-shell, a slave-child eking out a measure of solitude in the underhalls.

Whispering an apology to Hound, who would soon wake up having to explain an empty reservoir, Jazz found a bladder and drained off all but a cup-full.

He was not expected back to Ratchet's repair bay for another half-shift, which gave him a small window to replace the energon, tie up some loose ends, before descending into the prison deeps for good.

The golden high-road of the Celestial Temple taunted him. The boulevard between the Decagon barracks and the temple was deceptively short, but the distance had become vast.

He looked up as a small retinue of flyers in their alt-mode circled a golden tower and entered into one of the high reaches. Once Jazz would have yearned, for he knew that they were about to visit Prime. But now even that small pang of delight was gone from him. He felt like a fool, wishing away his entire life over a mad oracle's false prophecy.

* * *

It did not take him long to find the path the Alphas had taken him. Like all mechs of the permanent night, he had a heightened sense of direction. The energon sloshed around in his pack as he descended towards the old roots of the Temple. He paused only as he saw a dried silver stain of massblood on a conduit pipe. His blood. The irony was not lost on Jazz, following his own blood back to the Prima shrine.

This time he did not fall down the ventilator shaft. His servos were still tight, but he shimmied his way down without a hitch. Now that he could see where he had gone, Jazz was quietly amazed that he hadn't sheared himself open on a rusted barb of metal sheeting or ribbon-sliced himself on a peeling edge.

His fears that the Prima shrine would be hard to find were unfounded. The bacterial glows lived and died in their eternal soup, and the yellow glow painted the conduit as if a luminescent marker had been sprayed there. Jazz swung onto the conduit shelf and crawled out into the small chamber.

Almost as soon as he had recovered to a standing position, a terrible feeling washed over him.

He was not alone.

At the far end of the chamber, where the glows were brightest, a huge dark figure was kneeling before the shrine. Huge. He was kneeling and muttering a half-sobbed language that Jazz did not know. Jazz, who prided himself on at least recognizing nearly every spoken Cybertronian language, felt a spark-shrink of apprehension, and his mind ran to the Omega Guardians, the long dead race of monster-mechs that were still thought to populate the darkness of Cybertron, mindless mechanica that knew only how to kill.

Oh Primus.

The creature hadn't noticed him. In all his rocking and murmuring, it seemed caught in some religious fugue. Jazz was on a razor's edge of a decision. What if he moved again? What if he stepped and disturbed it...?.

Jazz felt his joints grind against each other with the effort to keep still.

But as his optics adjusted to the dim light, he decided that this was no monster-guard, no thing from a sparkchild horror tale.

It was a mech, a big mech with his back-armour torn by weeping silvered cuts. There were older inuries, pink with colour-nanites re-colonising the wounds, but most of the lashes were silver-new and painful.

With a jolt of recognition Jazz remembered the overseers of the River Blood, driving on the great dumb throttlebots as they pulled the bluecake barges.

Only an electrowhip made such a wound.

An electrowhip. The overseer's torture device. Banned now. Jazz could not contain his horror ad pity. He vocalized, let out an "Ahhh..."

Quick as an electrical arc the throttlebot turned, fists clenched. Jazz saw a face for only a second before a battlemask was thrown up. The mech's shadow fell over Jazz. He was big, sweet Primus. Here Jazz had been expecting a sparkchild and now...

"Ah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude."

In his panic he realised that he had spoken the dark-planet patios, a pidgin Insect. Stupid! As the mech advanced he repeated again in standard Autobot, and then in High Autobot, and the mech didn't stop coming. Jazz dropped his gear and cried out in all the languages he knew until finally in Alpha he shouted, "Stop!"

The mech lumbered to a stop. The fists were still flexing. "Who are you?"

A demand, in a deep measureless timbre. The throttlebot had spoken in Alpha dialect. Jazz could only stare. It was as if a turbo-fox had decided to discus the Amended Laws of Vector Prime.

The movement had made the wounds bleed again, and they flowed down the throttlebot's legs before puddling at his feet.

"Ja... Jazz."

"Are you Senator Meridian's guard?"

Such an odd question. "No, no. I'm from the dark planet, from Stanix."

It was as if he had just switched himself into invisibility and ceased to exist. The throttlebot looked at him once more, suspicious, then turned away and went back to the Prima shrine, tracking footprints as he went.

Jazz looked at the big crazy mech with the lash marks, keeling before Prima, murmuring his strange language, and felt altogether uncomfortable.

"I brought energon. I'm sorry, it was me that ate your white energon cache." There was no reply. Jazz continued, "It's yellow stuff I'm afraid. We don't get much white energon in the barracks."

He moved to put the bladder in the decorated case. The mech still stared at Prima, fixated on the picture. This intimacy, this prayer. Jazz would have been more comfortable watching two mechs fucking.

"You worship Prima too, huh?" Jazz wasn't certain how to speak anything other than a very formalized Alpha, and realised that his attempt to be casual only made him sound gauche.

He did not expect a reply and got none.

"Um," Jazz said again, "Those marks will scar if you don't fill them. You should get to a medic."

The throttlebot said something, and Jazz thought it was just more murmuring before his mind caught up with the translation. "I have been disobedient. It is my punishment."

"Punishment? This? It's un-Autobot, that's what it is!"

"It is punishment."

Jazz stared. The massblood smell was making him queasy. "You need to stop the bleeding, and then the pain stops."

A shame, that he would know this. An overseer had once told him that the whip could be used if pain relief was given afterwards, it was somewhat ethical then.

_These big throttled mechs, they cannot comprehend pain. You or I - we would go mad with agony, but for them, hurt is the only thing they recognize._

The chamber was old and dusty, and the dust was a fine, clean metal dust, percolated down from thousands of years. Trying to recall what Ratchet did, Jazz gathered several hand-fulls from the corners, found the plate with Primus' face and whispered a quick prayer of forgiveness before dumping the dust in the middle. Once he had wetted the dust with the yellow energon, he swizzled the muck with a finger.

"Pretty crazy," Jazz said, almost to himself. "You left the white energon there for me, so I'm going to help _you_ now."

He approached the throttlebot with the dish held out in front of him.

"Listen," Jazz said, "I know you're had your sentience turned down because of your size, but this is sill going to hurt. I've never done this before. So don't hit me or anything."

The mech must have had a high tolerance for pain, or the beatings must have numbed him, for he only flinched at Jazz's touch.

As he worked, the silence unnerved him, so he began to speak on the only shared thing he had with this big stranger. "Prima was truly one of the great Primes. She brought back to planet from despair and darkness. She restored the belief of the All-Spark, made Alpha Duex submit to her, even when he was warlord of all Cybertron."

"I do not know this Prima."

Jazz stilled. Whether from the throttlebot's words or just the fact that he spoke, jazz did not know, but a chill settled in the space between his shoulders.

"But that is her, on the wall. You pray to her."

"I do not know who it is."

Jazz pulled his hands away from the dressed wounds as if burnt. The mech had spoken like a No-Sparker or a Decepticon.

"It is Prime," he whispered. "It is our god."

Whatever Jazz had said made the mech snap out of his fugue and he drew back his fist before smashing it into the wall, smashing it into the face of Prima, smashing the priceless icon again and again until her visage was replaced with crumpled metal plates and smeared massblood.

Jazz jumped back, scared. "Easy, easy, calm down."

The mech turned back towards Jazz, breathing hard, hatefulness and panic flaring across the now naked face. The pavements belonged to a much younger mech than the armour suggested, and the optics were bright, almost too bright for a glassed-over grey of a cyber-throttled mech.

"I have been here long enough," said the throttlebot between breaths. "It I do not return I will be beaten again."

Jazz switched his glances between the fist and the destroyed face.

"What are you," Jazz cried in an almost mortal agony. "What are you if you do not know who Prima is?"

The throttlebot's face seemed to contract in on itself, and the voice that came was certain and terrible, a pronouncement to Jazz and the world.

_"I am a slave!"_

Jazz exhaled and watched as the throttlebot left him, stalking away with a stance that belonged to no slave, more Omega Guardian than anything else, and left Jazz to find his way out alone.

* * *

TBC


	8. Nec mortem effugere quisquam

**_Nec mortem effugere quisquam nec amorem potest - (No one is able to flee from death or love)_.**

.

* * *

"Now hold the suture in place here, easy, easy, keep the pressure on and I'll glue up this conduit. It's not pretty, but he won't be squirting massblood to here and All-Spark."

The lights shorted and flickered. Grimy light washed over them in sharp stacato, then died.

Ratchet swore, rubbed the condensation on his forehead with the back of his wrist.

"It's fine, Ratchet," Jazz said to the false-colours of the dark. "I can still see him."

"Of course, you being a dark planet mech. Tell me then little brother, how is my patient?"

The prisoner might have been a corpse for all the life he showed, but the energon conduit had connected true. The chemical communication between the colour nanites had restored. The sickly grey patina over the armour now blushed and darkened to a deep, almost blue-black. He would be yellow in true light, painted in sunshine.

_Which_, thought Jazz ruefully, _this one might never see again._

"Alive," said Jazz, his medical vocabulary limited. Then he watched Ratchet feel the prisoner with his dark, sensitive hands. Felt him as if he were blind.

"Haven't you lived on the dark side of the planet too, Ratchet?" Jazz asked, curious. "You should have dark-sight."

Ratchet visibly recoiled. His face was etched with bad memories. "I should. But infra-sight degrades in sunlight. I was brought to the sunlit side against my will, to serve the new Prime. No expensive optic filters like yours, Jazz." Ratchet pointed at his own dim optics. "I lost my dark-sight along with my hope."

The darkness was making Ratchet confessional. Jazz felt that he was on a precipice between holiness and blasphemy. "You knew Prime?"

"How could I have not had my chance to kill him if I did not know him?"

Jazz shrugged, even though Ratchet couldn't possibly see. "I guess I thought it was just... like some foolish conspiracy. A couple of mechs planning and threatening from afar."

"No. I knew him," said Ratchet in a monotone. "I held the Matrix of Leadership in these hands, I held it and could have torn it from his chest, ended the Prime line for good."

Jazz stepped back. Not fast enough, for Ratchet seized his hands, seized them in hands that had held the Matrix, _held the Matrix_. The room stunk of madness and lost faith.

"A heresy, Jazz, that's what they have done. They have animated a dead thing."

"Ratchet, you're scaring me."

Ratchet paused, and looked at each of his gripping hands as if he could see. He let Jazz go.

Jazz withdrew a short distance. Ratchet was contrite.

"I'm sorry," he said, "The things that I have seen, they eat me up from the inside out. I cannot tell another living thing what I know, and it's killing me."

For all his harsh dark-planet upbringing, for all he had been treated badly here, Jazz could not discard his natural sympathy. Ratchet was clearly a mech who had undergone a great trauma. Jazz would forgive him.

The patient moaned softly.

Jazz noticed a violet fluorescence to the vacant optics, a parallel shade in the spark. He peered up questioningly at Ratchet.

"Trans-Decepticon. Traitor," said Ratchet, wiping his hands on a rag and taking a breather from his emotional outburst. He did not sound critical of this half-and-half mech. "It was fortunate that he used to be an Autobot. I don't have much experience with Decepticon cyber-physiology. Any more developed into that race, I might not have been able to save him."

Jazz peered down at the prisoner's open chest, at the cracked energon reservoir nestled amidst brutalized massflesh. Gore aside, Jazz had to admit the inner workings of a mech were as intricately beautiful as any true machine.

"A traitor?" Jazz was struck. "If he's a traitor, then he's sentenced to the death-smelters! Why have we bothered fixing him?"

"You thinking he doesn't deserve to be fixed?"

"Of course he does, but Ratchet, you're so busy. You haven't recharged since I was last here. No wonder you're acting so odd."

Ratchet patted Jazz's forearm, almost as if to apologize for everything that had gone before. "I'll close him, Jazz. You can clean up."

Jazz paused for a moment, the conflict grinding inside his processors like a loose piece of metal. He wanted to be around when the trans-mech woke, ask him why he had done such a thing and change from Autobot to Decepticon. Between Ratchet's crime and the slave-mech who did not know the name of God, it was as if the careful foundations of his beliefs were starting to crumble.

But the mech was in a throttled twilight now, and would remain in that state until he took that final fall into the smelting pits. At a loss for something to do, Jazz returned to cleaning up the repair bay.

* * *

Truth to tell, he did not mind the work Ratchet gave him. Ten double-shifts he had worked now, and already a new knowledge was beginning to come. He discovered an aptitude for medical procedures that went beyond the blunt field-medic work. The Autobot body had much in common with other intricate mechanica, of bombs and weapons, and in class he had always excelled at building those.

As the time passed, Ratchet had gone from dismissal to being pleasantly talkative, taking Jazz through his procedures, their meanings and their histories, and last-chance alternatives if there wasn't enough equipment around. Strange to think of it, but Jazz was getting as good an education at Ratchet's side as he was in the classroom. There was even a slim chance he might be ready to take the Academy entrance exam.

Then the sight of some confiscated contraband behind a locked case caught Jazz's attention, and his optimism faded. He looked at the hand-made weapons with despair. As good an education as he was getting, at Ratchet's side he was never going to learn how to fight.

Beside the medical berth, Ratchet now laid a hand on the prisoner's shoulder. _Another trait of Ratchet's_, thought Jazz. He was a toucher and healer, as much an Oracle of the mechbody as the street-preachers were of the uncertain future.

The aging voice was as soft as that of a lover. "I'd get you to transform into your alt-mode friend, that will speed up the process, but because that is forbidden I will make certain you are not on work detail for to long. Now rest."

A guard helped the repaired mech to his feet, led him out. Ratchet washed his hands of protoflesh. Once the prisoner was gone, the medic's manner changed.

"That spark-injury was a rape, pure and simple. Jhiaxus interrogated that spark until it was metaldust."

Jazz stopped sweeping long enough to look sideways, but did not speak. Ratchet often grumbled about his patient's injuries after they left. He did not always want a reply.

Another mech came in after Ratchet closed his clinic for an energon break. This one was a rough-looking 'bot in red livery, top-heavy with thick cords and armour slabs across his arms and shoulders. The newcomer glared at Jazz with a severe, scarred face.

"Who's the soft-shell?"

Ratchet waved in Jazz' direction. "Jazz. Academy drop-out, come here to help."

Jazz seethed a little, then decided that Ratchet may not have said it to be mean. His Academy prospect status made him suspicious to many of the prisoners.

"Ironhide," said the stout red mech in introduction, tapping his broad chest. "Academy, huh? I graduated back in the Golden Age. No rusted Decepticons then."

"I still might go back," Jazz said with a wounded pride. "I'm only here because..." he paused.

Ironhide finished forward. "Someone thought you might have a chance at being salvaged. Let me guess. Black and white mech, high rank, a Beast Caste perhaps? Prowl?"

Jazz shook his head. "No. General Kup."

Ironhide did not look so disappointed, but perhaps his scared facial pavements had welded into paralysis. "Huh, I thought it would have been Prowl. He likes a good looking young mech. But then you're not an Alpha, so that probably discounts you."

Ratchet coughed, and waved Jazz on with his work.

As Jazz swept up the clinic, he listened to Ratchet and Ironhide talk about the politics of prison life. Both mechs were high-status prisoners. Apart from the guards and the stasis bands, their society could have been like a hermetically sealed Academy.

"...so Senator Meridian owns him now," Ironhide said, mid-conversation.

Jazz was not really listening. Only the Senator's name tipped Jazz into alertness. He approached the two felons nervously.

"Excuse me. Did you say Meridian?"

Ironhide gave Jazz a look. "Why? You know him?"

"I... I met one of his slaves, uh, running errands near the manifold cooling vents." Jazz had a sudden burst of common sense and did not go into detail. Slaves weren't allowed much of a free run of the temple underhalls.

Ironhide squinted in Jazz's direction. "How do you know he was a Meridian slave? There are many slaves in the Temple."

"He was pretty beat up."

Ratchet's jaws snapped down hard on a cube of dirty bluecake energon. "Sounds like one of his, then. Meridian uses them hard. I'm surprised he doesn't get a blade between his armour, the way he abuses them."

"Meridian likes pain," said Ironhide, a curious glint in his optics. "It excites him sexually. You know, there was a rumour that he used to have his mechs de-armoured so he could satisfy himself on their dying bodies."

Ratchet coughed, had the grace to be disgusted at Ironhide. He gave Jazz an apologetic glance. "Now that's only a back alley rumour. Besides, Meridian is not one for mass sharing or spark sharing or any common intimacy."

Jazz leant on the broom, thought of the miserable throttlebot, his young face, body aged before his time.

"No need to look all depressed kid," Ironhide said between bites of energon. "That's just the way things are nowadays. The Decepticons are massing at the city walls, and the hierarchy clings to the old ways, no matter how corrupted and decayed those ways have become."

"What does the Prime do then," asked Jazz, "if things have become so bad?"

Ironhide let out a barking, "Ha!" He reached out for a canister of bluecake slurry, opened it and drained it.

"I think our _Prime_ has become part of the problem," said Ratchet.

Jazz did not miss the stress on the word _Prime_, and remembered Ratchet's felony. He did not want to speak further on the subject. He was too confused, thinking of the slave and Prima, of their broken society, of the way every moral thing was ever so slightly tilted askew. Most of all he feared that Ratchet might talk to him of terrible things, of his reasons for attempted Primicide, why he'd abandoned his faith and culture and tried to kill his god.

Jazz did not want to know why. He did not want to understand. He did not want to agree.

* * *

As a freemech Jazz was not allowed to recharge and spend downtime in the Decagon prisons. He could not go back to the barracks. He could not go to the surface, where Warpath and his cronies were waiting.

He deliberated for a long time before finally giving up. The only other place of comparative safety and shelter was the Prima shrine.

After studying some of the older maps, Jazz routed a shortcut to the chamber from the prison, and took his meagre possessions there.

The throttlebot had not returned. The plate of hardened metaldust still sat in one corner, nibbled by mech-vermin. Jazz touched Prima's ruined face, feeling the fist-dents and pressing his jaws together in concern.

"Prima, how could you be forgotten?"

Perhaps the whispers of the permanent night had more truth than he thought. Perhaps the line of Prime was coming to an end.

He rolled out his sleeping pad, and lay down on the foam. He read some texts from his data-pad, old Alpha Prime Laws from the Cycle of Ascent, before the patterns of recharge crept upon him.

The glows seemed to darken as his optics faded. He fell into a recharge dream of Prima, young soft-shelled Prima fleeing the might of Alpha Duex's warlord army, fleeing through the conduits of her temple. She had come here for safety, she had stayed here, perhaps slept where Jazz had slept, her body aligned with his.

Even in his dream he felt a little edgy, felt a first blush of excitement, knowing he was going into forbidden thoughts, of lying next to his God as a lover might lie.

It was a dream both disturbing and comforting, so when a rough hand poked Jazz's shoulder he knocked it aside, grumbling, "Another few clicks Nightbeat, not yet."

The nudge at his shoulder was more insistent.

Jazz unshuttered his optics. "What the...?"

He shaded his eyes from the glow-tube. The throttlebot was looking down at him. The antennae at his temples gave him a touch of insect appearance, although it was only a convergent design. This 'bot was pure mech.

"Why are you here?" rumbled the throttlebot.

Jazz rubbed the dust from his optics and stood up. "Easy, rust it, it's not like you own the place."

The throttlebot sat back on his haunches and studied Jazz as if he had never seen another living thing in all his life.

"You are not Senator Meridian's guard."

"No," Jazz snapped. He was tired, and wasn't in the mood for humoring single-processor mechs. "I told you, I have nothing to do with Senator Meridian."

"I believe you now."

"Thanks," said Jazz sarcastically. He checked his internal time. He had slept for far longer than he intended to. The next work-shift would soon be starting. No time to study, just back into the stink and grime of the Decagon prison.

He looked over at the throttlebot, who had begun to stack away his thieved collection into neat piles under Prima's ruined face. Another item had been taken from the temple, a red slice of glass that may have been the memory core to a computer. The throttlebot arranged it on top of a pile.

"Um, listen, you don't mind if I keep my stuff here do you?" asked Jazz. "I'm working over in the prisons. Freemechs aren't allowed to stay there."

"I do not mind."

"Good, good." Jazz rolled up his sleeping mat.

Since Jazz's patch-up job, the throttlebot's back had turned into a mess of ugly scabs, but at least it wasn't open to a rust infection, the greatest danger of an electrowhip beating. Soon the scabs would cure and fall off. If the big mech was lucky, his colour nanites would colonize the wound, and there would be no scars.

"Your back's not too bad."

The throttlebot didn't seem to acknowledge him.

"I'd better go now," said Jazz.

More piles now. Sometimes they were arranged according to shape and colour, sometimes with no discernable pattern, like a deliberate randomness.

"Yeah, um," Jazz fumbled around. He knew that a throttlebot would not have the emotional capacity to care one way or the other, but it was not in his nature to be rude, to just leave. "Do you have a designation? A name?"

"A name?"

"What do they call you?"

"They call me many things," the throttlebot seemed to sigh.

Jazz shook his head. "Your real name."

The mech paused. The optics went to Prima, then to the floor. "Optimus," he said, quietly, his smoked out voice like the rumble of tectonic plates.

Jazz tried not to laugh. It was an Autobot name, but far too good a name to be used on a slave. He remembered a throttlebot barge-puller in Stanix who everyone called Lord Toil. He had been a figure of fun and ridicule, a once proud mech brought down into shuffling debasement all because of his size.

All of a sudden Jazz didn't want to laugh anymore.

"My name is Jazz, remember?" he said seriously. "I'm originally from Stanix."

"I do not know that place."

Jazz huffed a breath. Just then his eyes fell upon a aluminium crystal globe in Optimus' strange little hoarde. The black, asterized crystal was as big as a fist. Iacon was etched on one side.

Patiently, as if to a child, "See, this is where we are. And I live here, on the other side." He held the globe to one of the light-tubes. "It is always dark in Stanix. Cybertron faces away from the sun, here."

Optimus took the globe out of Jazz's hands and inspected it as if he had not known what it was until Jazz had told him. His finger moved across the line that represented the River Blood, and the great pit of Primus' wound.

"Where on the River Blood are you from?" asked Jazz.

Another one of those blank stares. Jazz reached out towards the shadow-scar on Optimus' shoulder, the mark of a barge-puller.

When he touched Optimus, the big mech flinched away.

"Ah Primus, I wasn't going to hurt you," Jazz protested. "It's just that you have a barge-puller's mark. You have to have come from the River."

Optimus shook his head. I am from here. I've always been from here."

Jazz shrugged, bored with pointless arguing now. "Suit yourself. "

If he had wanted to talk more, the opportunity faded, for Optimus lay on the hard ground, chest-down like a sparkchild might, head resting on his forearms, the bright metal scabs glinting in the eternal organic light.

* * *

Not so long later - perhaps the next shift, for all shifts blended into each other - a visitor came to Ratchet's quarters.

Jazz had to duck out. He didn't want Prowl to see him like this, grimy and imprisoned, his forearms stained with massblood.

They argued for a while, Prowl and Ratchet. Jazz did not want to listen, but every once in a while a snatch of Beast tongue, a chain of words. _You did it! It had to be you! How did you get near him?_

Jazz went down the conduit a little way, watched as a pair of harried guards accompanied Ironhide into Ratchet's clinic and the argument resumed in a blunt Autobot language.

Disturbed, Jazz went to a cleaning trough, and went about scrubbing Ratchet's tools for the third time that day.

He had not noticed the small door next to the trough. Prowl stepped out of it, Lord Prowl, second in command of the Autobot army.

Jazz had never felt so mortified. He stood there, arm-deep in a nasty, stinging solvent while Prowl frowned at him.

"What are you doing here, cadet?"

Kup," Jazz stammered, internally cursing his lack of bravery. It's part of my... er... punishment."

Prowl looked flustered and, it seemed, energon-drunk. He glared at Jazz, and for a moment Jazz thought he was going to be yelled at.

But the words came, short and blunt. "There is to be a turn-out of Academy Prospects at the close of third-shift. You will be there."

"I have to finish..."

"You will be there or you can forget about re-joining your unit," snapped Prowl, before striding off. The nervous guards followed him, even though no prisoner would dare attack this mech now.

Jazz dropped the medical tools into the trough, and leant on the rusted lip. An Academy turn out? It was everything he had hoped and feared.

"He wasn't always that way, y'know."

When he looked up, Ironhide was leaning at the doorway, arms folded, wry grin on his battered face.

"He was quite the gentleman soldier once," Ironhide continued. "Nova Prime's Second."

Jazz nodded, "Yes, I know."

"It was considered to be a very progressive move on behalf of Nova, to promote a Beast Mech so high. Prowl was young, then. Didn't see it for what it was, a political act. Thought Nova wanted him for more."

"Oh." Then, because his curiosity was aroused, "Was it more?"

Ironhide shook his head. "Nova was into certain practices that are anathema to us. Prowl fails to see that he was too good for the likes of Nova Prime."

"To good... for a Prime?"

"Loving a Prime is in some ways the most destructive thing that can happen to a mech," intoned Ironhide, his optics dark. "Prowl fell into that trap. He got too close to the sun."

Jazz sighed with empathy. He could understand how it could be, even from way out here, the totality, the utter knowledge of being in the presence of God. You would cease to become an identity, merely a shadow, a speck upon the radiance of Prime.

Perhaps it was best that they were not to meet.

"I'll let Ratchet know you need to be at the turn-out. He'll let you go early."

"Thank you," said Jazz.

Ironhide looked at him, nodded once. The words that came were cryptic. "Take care. I trust you know what you're doing, but be careful. You're playing in the theatre of danger now."

"It's just a night in the Towers, sir."

Ironhide gave him a look, before fading back into the prison shadows.

* * *

Prowl would not have normally been up so late into the shift. But the Academy selections were drawing close, and he had been halfway through constructing a lesson plan for his more advanced students. Meridian's shouts had drawn his attention like an alarm.

The indignant screams had a crazy, strident edge to them. A dangerous tone. When Meridian yelled at Optimus like that, the electrowhip followed.

After losing custodianship of Prime, Prowl knew he could have moved his apartments. He knew that there were much more luxurious quarters set aside for retired hero Generals like himself, but he could not leave Optimus alone to Meridian's mercy.

He dashed into Optimus' room just as Meridian unfurled the long, segmented tail of the whip. The pavements of Optimus' face were tight with an almost savage belligerence, this half-mad, unsocialized Prime they expected to make a leader of. The insentient, hateful turbo-fox glare followed Meridian about the room. Already his armour had loosened for a battle.

Prowl felt the dagger-stab of prescience. Someone was going to die in this room.

"Stop, Meridian, stop!"

Meridian flashed an enraged look at Prowl. "Stay out of my business, Captain, General, or whatever false rank they have given you!"

He beat down his anger, tried to keep his tone calm and level. "What has he done, Meridian? If you must use the whip for every minor infraction, you will have nothing to use for a major one."

Optimus threw him a look of betrayal, and Prowl felt his spark breaking. He had never allowed himself to show Optimus affection, never, and now his spark had become brittle and small.

Meridian strode up to Prowl, his cloak rasping over the ground. "He has violated his punishment. Instead of dwelling on the reason for his lashes, he sought medical attention."

Prowl did not allow the surprise to show. Medical attention? Optimus? He knew that his charge sometimes went to hide away for short periods of time - Prowl suspected one of the old Autophage nests, or the old Prima Shrine below the fighting pit. But those places were virtually inaccessible.

"I knew," lied Prowl. "I had a medic come for him."

"You... you..? You flagrantly disobeyed my authority, interfered with my charge, my training?" Meridian had worked himself up into a rage. Prowl was for a moment certain that he would feel the bite of the whip himself. The guards shuffled nervously nearby.

"You are supposed to train him Senator, not kill him."

"You have not heard the end of this, Prowl."

With his hissed threat, Meridian left, and Prowl was left alone with Optimus. The danger-feeling had not yet gone. For the first time he was afraid of this spark-child.

"Turn around," he said, harshly, trying to keep command.

Optimus was used to following orders, and turned around. Prowl looked at the repair job, mouth tight. He touched his finger to a still-damp seal, tasted it. Old dust and solar energon. He knew of only one mech who could slap together a repair job like this.

"Who did this Optimus?"

He could see Optimus' shoulders tightening up, the jaw refusing to open. Prowl sighed. Meridian thought wrong if he thought the electrowhip would make Optimus tractable. For some mechs, pain weakened them. For others, it forged them in fire. Optimus had too much of Nemesis Prime in him, too much of Alpha Duex, for all that his body was remade and recycled. The Alpha Senator was only going to make things worse.

Optimus would be lost to them even before he made it to the Academy.

Prowl returned to his apartment and drank energon until the walls started to spin.

"Ratchet," he said to himself, "how the hell did you get near him?"

He would not have dared to do it sober, but now the energon-courage made him call an escort to the Decagon Prison.

* * *

The hot smelter below him only made an encroaching energon hangover worse. Seeing Ratchet's broad, patient face made the unprocessed slurry in his reservoir churn.

"How did you do it? How?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, _Captain_," said Ratchet.

"Prime!" hissed Prowl. "Repaired from an electrowhip beating! No sun-side medic knows how to treat an injury like that!"

The mention of an electrowhip seemed to banish the insouciance from Ratchet's face. Prowl could see a roil of emotions there, conflicted. He knew Ratchet hated Optimus, but still and still, an electrowhip?

"So you have had to resort to torture to bring your monster in line," murmured Ratchet. "Why am I not surprised? A Nemesis clone, dragged from the Pit, locked up alone and beaten with a pain-bringer? You know, I halfway believe that Megatron may meet his equal when he meets your Prime."

"Stop making light of this! How did you get close to him? Were you smuggled out? How did you get near him?"

"It wasn't me," said Ratchet, simply.

They were interrupted by Ironhide. "What's all this then?" he demanded, as if he were not a prisoner but a Warrant Officer stumbling on a fight between squad members.

"Someone fixed Prowl's ex-charge from an electrowhip beating," Ratchet said casually.

"Fixed?" Ironhide frowned, and Prowl stood back in unsteady impatience as Ratchet explained to Ironhide the physics of an electrowhip beating. The device could power through the protective electrostasis barriers of a mech's armour, that aura that could protect a body from bullets and shrapnel and bombs and blows.

Ironhide made a hissing sound. "Damn dark-planet overseers. Coming up with a thing like that."

"Prowl blames me for the mysterious repair job," said Ratchet. "Senator Meridian thinks that it's Prowl. A strange mystery."

"Unless..." murmured Ironhide, then shook his head.

"Someone fixed him!" Prowl found that his exhaustion was making him whiny and repetitive. "If someone can fix him, then someone can kill him."

"Meridian will kill your Prime soon enough," Ironhide said. "He might not even survive to meet Megatron."

Prowl threw up his hands. There would be nothing from these two traitors. He didn't even have the energy to tell them to stay away from Prime, or however the contact had been made. It wasn't up to him anymore. Optimus was out of his control. Prowl could not even protect him.

In a black funk he left by a side door, not wanting to look at the two Temple Guards loitering for him. Soon the temple would be buzzing with this private business.

A familiar looking mech was leaning at a solvent-trough, cleaning massblood from blunt-looking instruments.

Prowl frowned at him. It was that Academy Prospect, the one thrown out for fighting, going AWOL.

"What are you doing here?"

"Kup," the prospect. "It's part of my... er... punishment."

Of course, Kup was trying to do some damage control. Prowl looked the Prospect - Jazz, he remembered - up and down. A dark-planet mech, clean limbed, pretty under all that grime. Suddenly Prowl felt a drunken, angry flush of arousal.

He couldn't bear to look at an Alpha tonight, couldn't bear to be reminded of Nova and Optimus. Prowl could feel his face twist. It would be too easy to take a dark-planet runt around the corner for a quick rubbing of sparks. Not at all like the careful seduction of a haughty Alpha. He toyed whether to fuck this one now and be done with it, get this angry feeling out of him.

_Easy Prowl, he's still a Prospect, and you have to be careful about messing with the students. It's still frowned upon._

He said, "There is to be a turn-out of Academy Prospects at the close of third-shift. The High Council Pavilion. You will be there."

Jazz pointed at the tools. "I have to finish..."

The arousal turned to anger. It had been a passing fancy, a imagined act of self-debasement, a Beast Caste lord like him with a grimy prison-vermin like this Jazz? Rust him.

"You will be there or you can forget about re-joining your unit."

* * *

Jazz wriggled into the shrine, dizzy with panic, and was surprised to see Optimus quietly pacing himself through a complicated fighting form with a staff in his hand.

The sight was unexpected enough that Jazz paused to let him finish. Whatever blunted emotions Optimus could feel, he took it out upon the empty air. His staff sliced through the space in front of him as if he could cleave even the atmosphere in two. Jazz held his breath, amazed at the sight.

Once finished, Optimus leant the staff - a temple guard's long-arm - against a rib-column.

"You can fight?" asked Jazz in wonder. "You're a fighting mech?"

Optimus shook his head. "No. Not good enough. One day perhaps."

Jazz clicked in disbelief. "That was a Golden Metallikato form! It takes years to perfect those moves. I don't think I've ever seen it being executed as a fighting form - it is far too complicated."

Optimus shrugged. Jazz wondered briefly if Meridian was trying to teach his big slaves fighting styles, aping Alpha Prime, who had kept a squad of Omega Guardians around him at all times.

There was not really enough time to ponder on the throttlebot's odd skill before Jazz raced around the shrine as if his head had been lopped off. "Primus, is there a buffer or a cloth here? Some solvent? I have to get this prison grease off me!"

"Why?"

"Why?" cried Jazz, "I've been invited to a rusted Academy Function, that's why! If I turn up looking like a convict I'll be laughed at. I couldn't stand to be humiliated in front of a crowd of Alpha-mechs, in the High Council Pavilion of all places. I'd rather die."

"Alpha-mechs?"

"Perhaps even your Meridian. Oh, why the slag did he have to ask me now?"

Perhaps it was something he said. An odd expression passed over Optimus' face, and he nodded. "Wait here."

Jazz didn't really want to wait, but the fact was that he would not have even been allowed in the front gate looking the way he did.

There were some old buffing cloths Optimus had used to wrap the more delicate pieces of his collection, but they were barely large enough to create more than a smear on the grease. Jazz wanted to weep from the unfairness of it all. If he even managed to make it into the Towers tonight he would be nothing more than a dirty Dark Planet mech. He would let down himself and his people. He would have failed.

He was almost ready to throw it all in when Optimus returned with a long, convoluted contraption that would have better suited a forward gunner in a squad.

Jazz goggled. Optimus had brought a sonic cleaner, but nothing so ordinary as the communal one in the barracks. The device was inlaid with blue metal, anodized in red and gold. It couldn't be anything less than a ceremonial object, holy.

"Primus, you can't steal that. That's priceless."

"I'll bring it back," said Optimus conspiratorially. "No-one will know."

Jazz knew he could have refused. A sonic cleaner was only slightly reduced from the weaponized base design. Did the throttlebot even know how to work the thing without slicing ribbons of armour off?

"Take it ba..." Jazz started, and yelped as the first pulses from the sonic polisher started to skip over his armour plates. "Primus God, be careful."

"I will be careful."

And Jazz believed him. It was more than the way the thottlebot spoke, not just that deep rumble. It was the conviction behind it. Optimus, you could trust. Jazz relaxed, and found that the experience - fear removed - was actually quite pleasant.

Optimus worked quick and fast, and with more than a little expertise. The dirt and grime eroded from him, leaving his colour nanites tingling.

"You've used this before," gasped Jazz.

"No," said Optimus. "I have seen it used many times. Tell me if it hurts."

"It does not hurt."

By the time the sonic instrument powered down, Jazz knew he had never been so clean in all his life. Optimus looked at Jazz with the shy sideways glance of a sparkling with just-hardened armour.

Jazz tried to see himself in a flat panel of polished silver. "How do I look?"

Optimus stared at him openly now, as if given permission. "You look..." he started, then as quickly as those blue optics had lit up, Optimus turned away sharply. His hands squeaked reflexively on the cleaner. "You will not feel shame tonight."

Jazz stood for a moment, conflicted. What had he just seen in those optics? A throttled mech had no concept of aesthetics or emotion or shame.

"Thanks. I mean it."

He touched the great forearm, in a gesture of gratitude.

Optimus flinched away.

Jazz slapped his forehead, annoyed. "I just wanted to say thank you, you crazy mech! Why do you act like I'm going to hurt you all the time?"

"Is there anything else?"

"Well of course there is," exclaimed Jazz, and he sounded more mean in Alpha, cool language that it was. "Friendship and affection. Duh. What to they tell you slaves up there?"

"Not about those things," murmured Optimus, still looking at the stolen device. He held it the way a soldier would.

"Friendship? A hug? A gesture of fealty. Never?"

Narrow optics. "No." Then, "I see the guards do it sometimes, when they think nobody is looking. Mouth on mouth..."

"A kiss?"

"If that is what it is called."

"You haven't heard that word?"

Optimus shook his head. Jazz exhaled, uncomfortable. His newly clean armour felt sandblasted. He didn't want to be here with Optimus now, not in the presence of this harrowed slave, this plaything of Meridian's cruelty. He didn't want to consider a life without affection, of nothing, not the hugs of a friend or the tender kisses of a lover. He had not yet broken his spark, but Jazz had enjoyed many other kinds of love play. He had always been a 'bot who enjoyed physical contact.

Looking at Optimus was like looking at a nightmare, Jazz's personal nightmare, of a life in captivity, without freedom, without love.

"I'll see you later, all right Optimus?" Already Jazz was wondering if he would be better off finding somewhere else to stay, and he felt guilty for it, because Optimus was looking at him in such a strangely naked way, confused and scared and pleading.

"Yes," said Optimus, "I will see you later."

Jazz could not leave the shrine fast enough.

* * *

.

.

.

(TBC)


	9. Nemo Liber 'PART ONE'

Nemo Liber Est Qui Corpori Servit (PART ONE)

_(No one is free who is a slave to his body)_

* * *

.

.

.

Though he struggled not to be nervous, every circuit and uncertain cyber-chemical switch was jumping. When Jazz stepped outside, the elegant span of Altihex - the Cybertronian orbital state - cast its minor-eclipse shadow over Iacon. Tonight the golden city was cupped in gloom.

The darkness had the effect of calm. The shadows gave him a place to hide. Nurtured by a memory of home, Jazz strode with false confidence across the boulevard that separated the magnificence of the Celestial temple from the louring heap that was the Decagon.

Off to the left of the temple were the Towers, the edifices built to honor the reign of the great Alpha Prime. Ostensibly, the Towers had been meant to accommodate the the temple workers, but over the aeons the workers had gradually been housed underground, and the Towers had been given over to the holy Alpha caste, those descendants of Prime.

Jazz reached into his chest-fold and clutched his Matrix- amulet close. You could almost believe that no civil war raged beyond the borders of Iacon, that the planet was not swallowing itself in conflict because of a hidden Prime and an undefeatable enemy. You could almost believe it here, in the golden city, that everything would be all right.

Some of the other invited cadets were making their own way across the High Road. The silhouettes were tiny in the Towers' bright entrance. A few had brought companions, but a great many were on their own, and they gathered in tight little groups, awed by the location and the rare night. Jazz recognized a few, but his hopeful gestures were ignored. He understood. He was cursed with bad luck, a mech who had failed mainstream Academy training, and was playing a quixotic game of catch-up in the prison deeps.

But then the strangest thing happened. A voice called out to him, "Jazz? You're Jazz?"

Jazz turned around. A short, stocky mech was running to catch up with him. It took a few moments before he recognized Bumblebee, the yellow-liveried Autobot soldier that had greeted him at the Autophage docks, all those cycles ago.

"Hello sir," he said, and Bumblebee waved the greeting down.

"Call me Bumblebee. Or Bee, if you want to consider yourself a friend."

"I didn't expect to see you at an Academy cadet function... ah, begging your pardon but..."

Bumblebee waved him down again, then took his elbow so it looked as if they were moving with purpose. Two Insect-type mechs could still be treated with suspicion by temple guards if they walked on the High Road, no matter how well ranked they were.

"Prowl's a good friend of mine," said Bumblebee tersely. "Or at least he used to be, before this business with the Prime."

"Now Bumblebee had Jazz's attention. "What sort of business?"

Bumblebee shook his head. A flat, hard expression gave him the look of a Dead-End street mech, one who has seen too much. "He should have declined that particular job, dealing with the Prime. He should have known himself better, known it was only grief over Nova that made him do what he did."

Bumblebee was cryptic, and said no more. Still, thought Jazz, Bee was a friend of General Prowl's, and Jazz was speaking to him! The tersely exchanged words in the Decagon prisons took on great meaning, and Jazz felt nervous again. Prowl, who had dared to wish himself lover of a Prime! It elevated the stoic and harrowed mech beyond holiness.

And Jazz had spoken to him.

As they approached the Tower portcullis, two guards crossed their staves, forbidding them to pass.

"I'm here on an invite," explained Jazz. "I'm a cadet prospect for the Autobot Academy."

The guards looked at each other, and Jazz feared that they would laugh. But he had cleaned up well and his color- nanites - however thin and washed out they were - shone. Equally, his time doing physical labor in the prisons had given him an air of strength which was hard to miss.

"I'll give a call to Perceptor," said one of the guards. "He's in charge of the function tonight."

While Bee and Jazz waited, a flash of brilliant green caught Jazz's attention. A mech in a long flashing cloak of intricately woven mail descended the curving stairway behind the guards. Jazz boggled. This was no Alpha pup like Warpath, forced to do an Academy Term prior to a given Senatorship. This was a true Alpha. His colour nanites were vivid and deep, the blue-green appearing almost black on some angles. His palladium headpiece was as intricate as any Beast-Caste ceremonial cap, and he walked as a mech who had no equal. A Prime descendant, mass-line descendant of Alpha Prime.

"What's happening here?" The voice was heavily Alpha-accented.

"Uh, Senator Meridian, we are just checking the credentials of these two."

_Senator Meridian?_ Jazz stared. So this was Optimus' master. Closer now, and Jazz could see the haughty malice in the high-caste face. This was a mech who had no problem with cruelty, could take pleasure in it, could use an electro whip against a throttlebot as if hurting a living creature meant nothing to him. Now Jazz understood why Optimus had asked Jazz if he were a temple guard or one of the Senator's servants, then cared so little when Jazz said he was not. After the hot horror of Meridian, all other mech-social experiences would fade into background noise and shadow.

"This one?" Meridian pointed at Bumblebee. "What's he doing here?"

"Sir," said the guard, "he's an old squad mate of Prowl's he--"

"Enough!" Meridian gave Bumblebee a dismissive up-and-down look that conveyed a world of loathing. "I don't care who invited him, he's not coming in. If he wants to visit his _squad mate_ he can do it in whatever filthy Insect hovel he comes from."

Although Bumblebee remained stoic, Jazz could sense the rage underneath the armour. What Meridian had said was beyond offensive. Bumblebee was a decorated Autobot soldier, his mass-donor a high-caste mech.

Jazz couldn't bear it, and jumped to Bumblebee's defense.

"How dare you speak to an Autobot soldier in that way!" snapped Jazz. "He's done more for us than all Alphas put together."

The guards audibly gasped, even though the one who had spoken first snagged a brief smile.

Meridian stared at Jazz, speechless. Someone had spoken back to him. _To him?_

Bumblebee laid a hand on Jazz's arm, and Jazz realised his fists were clenched, that he was shaking.

_"Easy friend,"_ Bumblebee murmured in an Insect dialect. _"I have expected this."_

_"But it's not fair."_

Bumblebee shrugged._ "It's the way it is."_

Not finished, Senator Meridian pushed past the guards to stare down at Jazz. He was a much taller mech, older and fight-trained, but Jazz could tell that there was little substance behind all his color and kibble.

Before he could talk, Perceptor's voice crackled through a speaker.

"Send them through," the little voice said. "They both have clearance to enter the Towers."

"I'm sorry, my lord," said one of the guards to Meridian. "But Perceptor ranks highest tonight - the Towers are under military jurisdiction."

Meridian's gaze did not leave Jazz. Jazz tried to return the glare, but all he could think of were the bright wounds on Optimus' back, the way they had been left open to fester and rot, no medical treatment, not even pain relief.

Only Bumblebee broke the deadlock, seizing his elbow and dragging him through to the bright foyer.

Once inside, the altercation with Meridian was almost forgotten. Astounded, Jazz looked up at the golden walls, the surfaces cut into a million prisms as if he were standing in the middle of an impossibly large citrine geode.

He backed up against a wall, almost unable to process such beauty, and found himself leaning against an engraving of three dimensions, so that when Jazz turned towards the wall to compose himself, the holographic face of Alpha Prime stared back at him.

He leapt away, startled, much to Bumblebee's amusement.

"The Gilgamech Epics," said Bumblebee, chuckling to himself. "The artisan who made these was the best holo-engraver Cybertron ever had to offer. He was half-Insect, you know, although the histories will never tell you that."

Jazz reached out, to where Prima's face repeated itself around a column. In one panel the three God Soldiers forced Alpha Duex before her, Warlord prisoner, slave, incarcerated and nonconsensual lover. Jazz couldn't look at Prima without thinking of Optimus, so he tried to put his mind on to easier things, the mound of near-white energon on the table, the cubes of exotic elements being passed around by the low, side-scuttling servants, the crowd of cadets all polished up to their best.

Jazz was grateful he had taken the effort to look decent. While Bumblebee went off to talk with some old ex-service-mechs, he took an element cube - a nasty radium blue - and joined several other wall-huggers watching the proceedings.

The mechs along the wall were either too shy or too low-ranked to break into any of the conversations that swirled about the room. Jazz, who loved language, shuttered his optics and listened to the music of a dozen dialects a once, learnt even while standing there, the phonemes, the shibboleths of a native speaker, the accents of one speaking another mech-tongue.

He spotted Hound in the crowd, and they exchanged waved greetings, but for all that there was little more between them. Jazz had little doubt that Hound had been advised to steer clear of the Academy failure.

Jazz saw the flash of regret in the broad pavements of Hound's face. In some other place and time, they could have been the best of friends. Now, they were separated by caste and circumstance. Jazz put the loss aside and moved on to a group of servant-mechs, who were only slightly throttled, and talked as if they were half-asleep.

As the night moved on, Perceptor approached a raised dais and spoke some brief words of encouragement to the gathered crowd, presented some awards to winners of a mid-term games event - one of whom was Warpath, for hand-to-hand combat of all things - and gave the stand over to Prowl.

The Autobot general looked tired and distracted, Jazz thought. His words were stirring, but they were said hollowly, with little enthusiasm behind it. Prowl left the stage before the polite applause had even finished.

So with that distraction over and done Jazz returned to sipping his hideous elemental, not savvy enough with Tower protocol to either keep it, ask for another, or pour the cube into a lead crystal pot-plant. Nobody approached him. He might have been one of the anonymous holograms on the wall, for all that he was part of the proceedings. Gradually he came to decide that it had been a mistake to have come. Who were these people? They were mechs he had little in common with as the brief eclipse night has in common with the endless shadow of the dark side of the planet.

Just when he'd made the decision to leave a low voice murmured behind him, "Jazz, correct?"

Jazz turned around and spilt the cube and contents all over the golden floor. Prowl stepped back to avoid being splashed, then gave a critical look at the radioactive goo.

"I can't believe you would drink that garbage."

"I wasn't," stammered Jazz, "I mean, I was, but only because a servant gave it to me..."

"No matter," gruffed Prowl. He looked Jazz up and down, and something in between a scowl and a smirk appeared on his face. "So, you do scrub up well. Even with that ridiculous retrofitted visor of yours."

"I didn't want to lose my dark sight," Jazz murmured. "Not if I had to go back home."

"Well, dark-sight can be useful to a soldier."

Jazz looked aside. "If I make it to the Academy."

"Hmm. You might have a chance on the final exams if you're learning from Ratchet and Ironhide, those two fools."

Jazz sensed a grudging respect from Prowl, and Prowl seemed like a mech who did not begrudge respect easily. Feeling bold, Jazz allowed himself to meet Prowl's gaze, meet eyes that had once looked into a Prime's eyes, even wished for love, if one could dare wish for such a thing. Jazz yearned to ask about Prowl's relationship with Nova, then damped the feeling down. Such a thing would be unquestionably rude.

"Bumblebee said you stood up for him against Meridian before," said Prowl. "Few mechs could claim that. Meridian can trace his descent from Alpha Prime's favored concubine. It gives him influence and power few can match."

"The Senator was bad-mannered," said Jazz. "Bumblebee is an Autobot warrior. He didn't deserve to be treated that way."

A faraway glance, as if Jazz's words registered in deep circuits. "No, a warrior does not deserve that treatment."

Some frequency in the air made everything heightened, as if he were on a precipice of what had gone before and a looming future. In that moment Jazz blurted, "Perhaps Meridian should fight Megatron, if he thinks himself so special."

Prowl stared. Jazz feared he had made a terrible faux-pas. Then the General laughed. Not one of humor, but an almost savage irony. "Yes, maybe he should."

Then Prowl regained his composure, beckoned Jazz to follow him. "Come with me. If you want to sample energon delicacies, you won't be doing it here."

Nervous and delighted at once, Jazz followed Prowl across the open theater of the Tower foyer.

* * *

Prowl knew it was a foolish thing to do, bringing this darkside mech with him. Not only had this one all but failed his Academy prospects, he had disrespected Meridian as well. Meridian rarely forgot even the lowest creature who put him in his place.

Then again, for all that the Alphas were descended from Prima and Alpha, they had lost something important in the translation, a kind of nobility and charisma. Well might they strut around in their fine cloth and their double-colour nanites, with codes for every door and every lock in Cybertron, but the Alphas were no more Prime descendants than the lowest chattel-slave of the Dead End. Who was to say Jazz was any worse than such devolved individuals?

Fortunately nobody took much notice of Prowl and his lowly young companion. The crowd had filled out, and a famous data-singer was onstage, singing requests that raged from the bawdiest codes to the most proper chord-algorithms. Most of the mechs were half-drunk on elementals anyway, and barely knew the difference.

Prowl led Jazz to an apse, an final alcove off the main vault of the chamber, and introduced Jazz to the dozen or so mechs who were playing - and betting - on a riotous game of Tactical that featured elemental cubes instead of soldiers. Whoever was winning was also intoxicated to the bargain.

"They're all soldiers?" Jazz internal-commed him.

Prowl nodded. "I've fought alongside many of these mechs," he commed back.

Bumblebee shifted his seat to allow Jazz and Prowl to squeeze in alongside him, and after a game finished with the victor falling off his seat in a daze, Prowl set himself up opposite a smooth-looking young Academy graduate called Jolt.

"We'll play together," said Prowl. "Perceptor said you were good at Tactical."

"Um, I've just been playing it for a long time, that's all. There's not much to do on the downtime, where I lived."

Prowl was not used to humility, and studied Jazz. There was nothing of the Alpha in him. Nothing to remind him of Nova, or Optimus. Jazz was a blank slate who brought no memory of despair or desire.

The younger mech seemed uncomfortable under the gaze and Prowl pulled away. But there was a lot in common between uncomfortable tension and sexual tension. Prowl smelt that frisson of cyberemonal discomfort and was aroused by it.

As the game progressed, and Jazz made a few foolish moves, Prowl realized his presence must be affecting him. It gave Prowl one of the few moments of sensation in the numbness of his existence, that restless curiosity. He had never bedded a darksider before, even during his tours. There was always the expectation of a kind of swarming dirtiness, for so many of them pullulated in the sunless wastes.

But Jazz was hardly the stereotype, even with his accent, his visor and his pale limbs and body. Prowl began to wonder. Was he a virgin? Or was he broken? Did they break each other properly? He could never bring himself to make love to a mech with an ugly, off-centre spark, and few could, but still, the curiosity was intense.

Dizzy with elemental intoxication, Prowl slid his arm around Jazz's waist, the universal gesture of want.

"Come with me back to my apartments," he commed.

Jazz froze. His vents hissed quick and panicked. Prowl could smell confusion and desire.

"Would it be proper? You're..."

"Come with me," Prowl spoke it now, a low murmur, deep and urgent.

He saw Jolt exchange a glance with Bumblebee, and then him, and with a shrug he allowed Jazz to defeat him in a pair of moves that in a normal game could have been blocked by the smallest piece.

Prowl took Jazz's hand, halfway dragged him out of the apse.

"Where are your apartments?" asked Jazz breathlessly.

"Not far." Prowl could hear the hoarseness of his own voice. His spark was hot and heavy in his chest. He wanted just to spark and join with a mech who brought no memories, who meant nothing to him. Jazz was hardly faceless, but Prowl would have had to procure a Dead End prostitute, risk a nasty case of rust, to get any lesser ranked mech.

Now he was glad he hadn't moved his apartments far from the temple.

As they hurried along, Jazz saw the doorway that led to the training pits.

"Oh, fight training, do you...?"

"No. Only the Prime trains there."

"The Prime--" Jazz's voice was almost a moan of wonder.

But there was no time for Jazz to let himself be overwhelmed. Prowl pushed him into his rude little apartment, closed the door. Before Jazz could look around at the shambling disarray of the small room, Prowl kissed him, a hard kiss, devoid of romance, just physical, impersonal wanting. Jazz came away, dazed. "Oh," he said.

Prowl pushed the unresisting young mech onto his berth, kissed him again, pawed clumsily along the thighs, between Jazz's legs where the forbidden massflesh burned hot, then over his pale chest.

"Open up for me," groaned Prowl. "Open up."

"I've never..." said Jazz, too intimidated to resist, but wasn't that the look on all his conquests. Prowl ignored the naked fear in Jazz's optics and released his own armour catches, revealed the bright golden cage around the living, glowing spark.

Jazz sucked in a breath though his vents, fumbled at his own chest.

"Hurry," said Prowl, roughly. "Come on."

The catches released. Jazz opened himself.

Prowl had been prepared for anything. A knotted, ugly spark. An odd-shaped break. Maybe even a virgin. But placed over the spark was an amulet, the coils and whorls of the Matrix catching the reflected light of his optics.

Prowl sat back with a gasp, a sudden thought of Nova flooding through him. An old grief welled up, and it was stained with the thought of Optimus, Nova's poor successor. All the last shreds of arousal drained out of him.

Confused, Jazz touched his amulet.

"I'll put it away if you wish," said Jazz, reaching for the clasp.

"No," said Prowl wearily. He put his hand over Jazz's own, stopped him from removing the icon. "No. It was wrong of me to take you here, against our ideals of fealty and Brotherhood."

Prowl turned his head away. So many young mechs he had taken, thoughtlessly, trying and failing to assuage his own grief, and only managing to dig the wound deeper. "But we have fallen so far, you see." His voice was hollow and empty. "We are not so much unlike the Decepticons now."

"This is the Matrix," said Jazz urgently, more urgent than sex, as if it was imperative he explain his icon. "All my life I have let those ideals guide me. We cannot be like the Decepticons, not while we have the Matrix of Leadership guiding us! We are Autobots, through and through, and will be forever as long as the Prime lives."

Prowl patted Jazz on the head, as if humoring a small child. "Of course. Close yourself up. I think we are done."

But Jazz wasn't done. His obvious disappointment made him babble. "You know Prime. You have seen him? You speak to him?"

"Yes," said Prowl, dusting himself down.

"What is he like? Please tell me..."

Prowl turned around, looked at Jazz's wretched and hopeful face. What did this sparkchild want to know? The Prime he hoped for? Or the Prime he was going to get, their rage-tortured monster?

"You really want to know?"

"Please."

"Then know that the Prime is as brutal as grief, as terrible as spark-death. He will challenge Megatron one day, and then perhaps we may wish again for the terror of Nemesis Prime. You have no idea what this latest incarnation is, Jazz."

The young mech's face fell. "A dark Prime?"

"I'm sorry," said Prowl. "I know you hoped for a golden age, the return of the Autobot ways. We have all hoped and wished for this. But our hopes are dashed and broken. The truth will be far from glorious."

Jazz stood up. The air whistled through his vents.

"You will not... join with me? Spark to spark."

"I am energon drunk. You don't deserve to be broken in such a way."

A sideways, nervous look, then a mumbled, "What about the Autobot Academy?"

"This may be its last solar year," said Prowl, wearily reaching for his energon stash. He wanted oblivion now.

"No, I meant, I still want to gain entrance to the Academy. I want to pass the final exams," Jazz blurted. "I'm still eligible."

Prowl tossed down a cube of energon and spoke to the dregs. "I'm going to be brutally honest. Whatever Ironhide and Ratchet teach you, neither of them can teach you how to fight. And the entrance exam will require one-on-one combat."

"Ironhide's a fighter. He can teach me."

Prowl grimaced. "Ironhide's a survivor. And he's strong, stronger than a mech three times his size. He has no technique other than wearing a mech down, which is not something you are not going to manage. I'm sorry Jazz. You'd better go."

* * *

Never in his life had he felt so unworthy. He had been so close to having his spark broken, and then been rejected, and even still, the image of his god, his savior, his leader, dashed and dirtied. A dark Prime. Like Nemesis. Terrible and brutal.

Jazz couldn't bear to be in the Celestial temple, but strangely enough the warning klaxons sounded an alarm just as he stumbled back into the chamber.

"Decepticons, Decepticons!" cried a voice, and pandemonium reigned. Mechbodies ran about in a disorderly jumble, only the military-trained mechs managing to get in line and present a degree of order.

But Jazz had no unit, no brigade to attach to. He had nobody.

Hidden by the tumult, Jazz made his way to the eclipse night outside. The shadows of Decepticon flyers were no more than small reconnaissance shadows.

He had barely made it halfway across the boulevard when the night sky seemed to tear apart, atoms rending open, space ripped like a wound.

From the tear, a giant figure fell.

Jazz was so startled he skidded over sideways, looked up, and up... until the battered, bleached chest obscured the terrible, scarred head. The old stories from his time as a sparkchild, the secret legend of the No Spark, the Dark Matrix, all these things crowded in Jazz's mind.

He did not want to say the name Megatron, but knew that it was him, the Decepticon leader, the one who had destroyed the Autobot defenses, the immolation that had burnt down their world.

A phalanx of Autobot cadets made a run for him, and Megatron swept them aside like shooing of mech-vermin, They scattered across the high road in a jumble of broken parts. Jazz dashed, and lay amongst the bodies, his mass-blood liquid with fear. Without the slightest concern Megatron walked across the injured mechs, oblivious to their bleats of pain.

Jazz clenched his joints and ground his jaw, waiting for pain. In a second that decayed foot would crush him to oblivion...

"Stop right there Megatron," barked a voice, a thin thread of panic under the gruff command.

Jazz turned to see Prowl leading a group of older Autobots, armed and ready. If there was any sign of Prowl's earlier intoxication, Jazz could not detect it. Prowl was as stoic as any prepared soldier. The Autobots, academy and cadet unit alike, set up position behind him.

Megatron looked at the gathering crowd and laughed.

"Oh, I am outnumbered," Megatron said, his voice like clashing gears, a metal machine warped off track. "But I come only to talk to your Prime."

"You will not speak with him." Prowl stepped forward. "And he will not speak with the likes of you.

"But how does he know that I am here? Let him come out. Let him talk to me, mech to mech, as two leaders. I do not wish to fight, only to talk."

Megatron had not noticed Jazz, who was slowly stepping back, his goal being the sheltering hood of a duct a hundred paces away. But it wasn't just fear that kept him from fleeing outright. He was curious too, the kind of deadly curiosity that kills scouts and sparkchildren.

He wanted to see Prime. Brutal and terrible, even as that, for no other creature could be pitted against Megatron and win.

"No," said Prowl to Megatron. "You think that the sacred self of Prime would ever set himself in your foul presence?"

"Nova Prime did," simpered Megatron. His features were obscured. Only the ghastly crimson glow from his optics gave away his true emotions. "He screamed and begged like a slave. He tore apart like scrap iron."

Prowl could not hide his horror. His facial pavements loosened, and Jazz would not have been surprised to see him fall apart.

Megatron continued, gloating. "I have nothing to fear from your Prime, since I could kill him with so much less that a thought. So instead I will come here to parley, and we will discus my allowing a small portion of Autobot culture to live. Here. In this Temple. A museum piece, if you will."

What Megatron had said enraged Prowl. "He spoke in a low, threatening growl that Jazz had never heard used. "Leave Megatron. Now."

The answer was not welcome. "Show him to me!" shouted Megatron, advancing on Prowl. "SHOW HIM TO ME!"

Jazz dashed for the duct just as the Autobot soldiers began firing. The alarms were wailing like a thousand tortured slaves in the smelter pits. He dove into the dark opening, not bothering to look where it might lead, tumbling down into emptiness.

* * *

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_._

_(Cont. Part Two)_


	10. Nemo Liber 'PART TWO'

**Nemo Liber Est Qui Corpori Servit (PART TWO)**

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He fell and fell, caught the edge of a split in the duct and fell further, before breaking through a rusted section and landing hard on some soggy debris.

Sobbing with relief and terror, Jazz stood up and looked about. A small amount of light was shining though a high opening, the only access being a suspect ladder, rusting away on one wall.

As cautiously as his Insect-talent gave him, Jazz traversed the ladder and found that the tunnel was an old Autophage run, the light was bacteria growing up the rounded walls. Someone must have spilt a glow-pot here, and the anaerobic, luminescent life forms had continued to grow across the walls in a filmy, living carpet.

Jazz brushed at an almost-obscured sigil.

"Oh," he whispered, as he saw the familiar whorls of the Matrix. He touched the sigil with his hand. Ancient of days. This run was another one of Prima's hide-outs. The old Prima-temple would not be so far away.

Using his impeccable sense of geolocation, Jazz maneuvered his way down the wrecked remains of the old 'phage run. If he lost his signal, the Matrix-sigil would get him back on track. He marvelled at her impudence, that long ago Prime. Her Temple had been overtaken by a No-Spark Warlord, and yet she had refused to leave it, creating her redoubt right under his feet.

The last few lengths were difficult. An long-ago firefight had sent rubble and debris into the tunnel. Jazz was fortunate to be small enough to push through the damaged parts.

Then he came into an oubliette, a narrow dank space lit only by an high overhead grate.

If he jumped, he could touch the grate, but he had no leverage to push it off. He was a fraction too short to chimney-climb the vertical tunnel, so for all intents and purposes he was well and truly stuck.

"Rust it!" he shouted at the grate. "And rust you!"

Jazz sunk to his haunches. He'd traveled so far, only to be stopped by a sewer?

Rust-flakes rained on top of him. Before he could work out what was happening, the grate had been lifted out of its fit, and Optimus was looking down at him.

"Ah rust it, Optimus, give me a hand will you?"

Jazz felt a quick despair at the thought of having to explain what he wanted, but he needn't have worried. The throttlebot pushed his arm into the oubliette and Jazz leapt up to grab his hand. Optimus pulled him out with ease, and replaced the grate.

"Thanks," he said, brushing the flakes from his shoulders "I thought I was going to be stuck." Then he looked at Optimus closely. "Shouldn't you be working?"

"The alarms," said Optimus. "Everyone hid."

Jazz nodded. "Megatron came to the Temple."

Jazz thought he saw a flicker of fear in the throttlebot's face. Well then. Even slaves knew who was to be feared.

"What did he look like?" asked Optimus urgently. "Was he big?"

"Yes. Big. Bigger than you even. A gang of cadets rushed him, and he smashed them to pieces with one blow of his fist." Jazz touched his visor, wishing he had never seen such a thing.

Optimus looked up, as if he were seeing some invisible commander, hearing an invisible order, and began to pace the floor in agitation.

"Don't fret about it so," Jazz snapped. He didn't intend to be impatient, but seeing Optimus' worry only magnified his own. "He only wanted to talk to Prime. Once that is done, he'll leave. He only brought a small group of fighters. It's not as if we're going to get invaded."

Then Jazz stopped with a sigh, realizing what he had done, had let his fear get in the way of seeing his Prime, of serving him, unto death. It would have been a small death really, a careless sweep of Megatron's hand perhaps, but it would have made the old Oracle's prophecy true.

Optimus stopped his restless pacing. "And did the Academy grant that request of him?"

The Alpha language could be oddly formal sometimes. Jazz tilted his head. "No. General Prowl flatly refused at first. But they've probably relented now. Or Megatron has gone."

This news seemed to calm Optimus down, and he retired to his corner of the old redoubt, among his collections of pilfered things.

Weary from all that had happened, Jazz found his sleeping roll and sat back, hands behind his head, looking up at the patchy luminescence of the ceiling.

"Such a night," he murmured, mostly to himself. "I almost broke my spark and then Megatron came. If I had waited much longer then I might have seen..." He stopped. Such a thing was too much. He had missed out on both love and his God. He stroked his chest, remembered Prowl's hands there. Hands that had touched a Prime, on his own spark...

"What is this spark-breaking?" asked Optimus.

Hiding his annoyance, Jazz turned towards Optimus. "You don't know?"

The big mech shook his head.

"It is... ahh, remember what we were talking about before. What happens with touching and intimacy?" Jazz fumbled over the words. Damn Alpha language!

"Yes." Optimus leant forward, optics bright.

"It is a continuation of those acts."

"You did this thing?" whispered Optimus. Jazz could feel an excited, forbidden heat radiating from Optimus. "This kiss, this touch? This spark-breaking?"

All of a sudden Jazz felt a wave of discomfort. Talking about sex to a throttlebot was like talking about it to a child. Both were not able to understand the complexities of the physical act, and if done to them, would only be done out of the grossest forms of coercion.

"No, I didn't break my spark. And we mustn't talk of such things."

He expected Optimus to argue in a stupid, throttled sot of way, but the big mech withdrew, instantly ashamed. "Of course," he said, sliding into Alpha properness. "I should not have been so bold."

Jazz pulled a resin cloth over the largest of the light sources, and the weave reflected dim hexagonal shadows across the walls. In a far corner, a mech-vermin ran across a solid floor, little legs chiming in the restless dark

Jazz drifted into recharge then, fell back and back into the shared memories of his kind, swam in the preconscious state of Primus, when he was still Cybertron, when he was still a planet, before he had become mechbody and massblood, before he had become Primon, before he had become them all.

Ah, my Prime, he whispered to his dream-self, awe and worship. He could not help but think of Prowl, who had too yearned for his Prime, but in a way real and true. Prowl, who had seen his Prime die...

...

...

...

Jazz woke with a gasp, the comprehension and sympathy of such a terrible grief. He woke and for a moment imagined himself back home, and when he realised he was not, such a wave of despair came over him.

He missed even Nightbeat's touches, even as unwelcome as they had become in the end. Poor Nightbeat, Academy dropout, lost to the streets of the dark planet, programmed to serve and protect, but cut off from the circuit that had made him.

Jazz wanted to go home.

How foolish he had been, believing he had a chance of being an Academy mech. Dragged far from his kin, thrown into this unwelcoming sunlit world. He had made a gross tactical error, and now his city was swarming with Decepticons, lost and foul, destroyed, destroyed.

Wrestling with his own agonies he turned to see Optimus crouched over a little square of glowing light. Jazz clicked in annoyance. His study tablet! His precious books! If the throttle-bot broke it with his clumsy great hands...

But Optimus treated the fragile piece of equipment with care. The phosphenes lit up his young-old face. Some deep memory stirred in Jazz, a distant recognition. Someone important. A friend, perhaps. Someone.

Jazz scratched his chest, the residual throbs of thwarted arousal still paining him.

Optimus said, without turning to him, "What is this?"

Jazz was startled. He hadn't realised Optimus knew he was awake. "A data tablet. A book."

Optimus flashed him a look, and Jazz grew hot with embarrassment. He had been rude, thinking that Optimus would not know what a book was.

He came close, saw the text.

"Oh, that's just Alpha Prime's Book Of Law. Foundation stuff. I have to recite the Prime Laws off by spark when I have my Academy exams." He saw Optimus' expression. "But you should know this. Everyone knows the Book of the Law."

He showed the page to Optimus, who shook his head. "I do not know that language."

"It's an Autobot translation. You don't speak Autobot, do you?"

Optimus shook his head sorrowfully, and Jazz was awed, that an Iacon Mech could not know their most common language, the language Alpha Prime had created. The Autobot language had united all the factions of Autobots that had existed after the demise of his Warlord mass-donor, his Pater. It was like not knowing your own face.

Jazz had a crazy idea then. It was a stupid idea, motivated more out of discontent and rebelliousness than anything else. "Would you like me to teach you some Autobot language?"

Optimus stared at Jazz, and for a moment he thought that perhaps he had spoken of something too esoteric and advanced for a throttled mech to handle.

Just as he was bout to say, forget it, Optimus whispered in a hoarse voice, "Yes."

Said it, as if Jazz had offered the most forbidden thing in all of Cybertron.

"Well," said Jazz. "Here's an easy one."

He spoke the words slowly, repeated them in Alpha, and spoke them in Autobot again. He showed Optimus each word. "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

Optimus repeated the Autobot translation carefully. His Alpha accent was strong, but he had no problem with the pronunciation.

Then, "This is a Law, Jazz?"

"It is the first Law, enshrined above the Temple entrance. That all who think, have awareness and feeling should be able to decide their own life path."

Jazz expected confusion. The blank, almost horrified expression on Optimus' face was something he was not prepared for.

"What about throttle-mechs. What about slaves?" The hissed words were almost savage. "Are they not sentient and free?"

"I'm not too sure about that. It is a very old law. There's lots of retorts when it comes to most of the Alpha laws. Perhaps throttling removes sentience, removes rights."

Hard to say such a thing to Optimus, who was clearly not of normal intelligence, but could not have reacted so if he were throttled like any other mech.

"Are mech throttled because they wish it?"

"Um, no. If a mech is too big, uh, their processors are turned down, throttled."

"Why?"

Jazz was flustered now. "I don't know! I mean, I do, but it makes little sense."

"Tell me."

Optimus was stalking Jazz around the room. Jazz became very aware of the size of him, the threat of him, the scars on his back, the remnants of his electrowhip beating, the survival of pain. Even for a throttlebot, an intense mental strength would have been needed to overcome such a terrible injury. Optimus was dangerous.

"Primus, throttling is a Law too, rust it!" cried Jazz. "Vector Prime passed the law after Omega Prime was overthrown. Two generations of Dark Primes and their rouge Omega Guardians running wild, of course such a law would be passed!"

Optimus stopped. "What is a Dark Prime?"

Panting, Jazz said, "When the Matrix doesn't grow properly. Something happens during the process. Bakes them bad. Evil and awful, and merciless. I don't know. It's not spoken of." Shuddering, he remembered Prowl's words.

...._the Prime is as brutal as grief, as terrible as spark-deat_h...

"They think," said Jazz softly, "that the current Prime may be a Dark Prime, and we may be plunged into unimaginable horror again."

If Optimus understood completely, Jazz could not properly know, but all the fight seemed to go out of Optimus, and his great shoulders sagged. No Cybertronian could not be affected, knowing that his God was afflicted so.

"I'm sorry for telling you that," said Jazz. "It is only what I heard."

"Now I understand," said Optimus with a sigh. "Thank you for telling me."

The mood had changed. Optimus had a quality of broadcasting his own anxiety, and it was infectious, and Jazz wrung his hands.

"Can I teach you some more Autobot, perhaps?"

Optimus nodded, and they sat together, and Jazz went through the rest of the Alpha Prime laws, and strangely, so strangely Optimus knew what the laws meant and the questions he asked were subtle and intelligent. A suspicion was starting to take root in Jazz, a suspicion he didn't want to speak it aloud.

Perhaps Optimus wasn't throttled at all. Perhaps... Perhaps...

Perhaps he was a sparkchild.

It was a crazy notion. But there were processes that only sparkchildren thought through, subroutines of logic that did not occur in adult mechs. Jazz knew there were more ways to create a mech that mass-growth and donation. There were reborns in the dark-side. It was a violent and dirty method of conception. The slavers used it sometimes, if they'd killed off a big throttlebot and still needed the body to do work. Golem. Zombi.

If that had been Optimus' fate, then they had done a brilliant job. There was not the stink of rot or rust about him. But he would mentally be no older than the date of his remaking, a child in an adult body.

Once finished with the Laws, Jazz turned off the data pad. "We can do some more after my shift in the Prisons."

"This is a gift," murmured Optimus. "I need to repay you."

Jazz thought, and his attention went to the training swords on the wall. "You can fight, yes? I saw that Golden Metallikato form you did before. Yours was the best example I'd ever seen."

Optimus bobbed his head, humble and clearly unused to Jazz's praise.

"I am not so good. Meridian tells me--"

"Rust Meridian," Jazz exclaimed hotly. "Rust that Alpha wreck. Don't think I don't see it, him trying to be like Alpha Prime with his blindly loyal Omega Guardians. No mech should live like that! Not you, not anyone."

"Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

"Yes!" Jazz nodded. "Let's make a deal, Optimus. You teach me to fight, and I'll teach you all the Laws kept from you, all the language they never taught. Rust them all, the Alphas, the Academy, all those priests who keep us on the sunless side and treat us as less than nothing."

Jazz's passion was infectious. Optimus rose to his full height, illuminated by a thought and knowledge of freedom he had never been allowed before.

Jazz grabbed Optimus' big hands. "It's a promise then? 'Til all are one."

"Yes."

"Now I have to go to work. I'll see you soon, and then we'll start."

Jazz felt so enthusiastic, he wanted to start straight away, but even more than his own time, Jazz knew that it was Optimus who would be missed by Senator Meridian if he was away too long. They would need to be as careful as secret lovers, but still, the excitement of it all!

He pressed his hand to the amulet. The Academy was once more a probability. Passing the entrance exams was a probability.

And at the end, at the very end, dark or not...

_Prime._

* * *

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_[TBC] Some notes at my livejournal..._


	11. stat sua cuique dies

**stat sua cuique dies**

_(There is a day for everybody)_

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**_._**

* * *

**_(For those who came late, or have been waiting for an update: _**

**_Jazz is a mech from the sunless half of Cybertron, _**

**_who has come to Iacon to join the Autobot Academy _**

**_and one day, maybe even meet his god, the new Prime._**

**_He is unfairly kicked out of his class and his dreams appear to have died _**

**_with the news the Prime has been ruined by his rebirth and corrupted by darkness._**

**_All seems lost until he meets a stranger in the abandoned underhalls of the Temple, _**

**_a slave-mech with fighting skills who agrees to train him in exchage for friendship... and more.)_**

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* * *

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"I'm going to hit you," said Optimus, "and it's going to hurt."

Jazz nodded. A jag of fear went through him, watching those massive arms heft a sword-blade half as long as Jazz again. He was going to be struck hard, but he was concentrating wasn't he? Concentrating like Optimus had instructed him, on that one point of his shoulder, that one spot of invulnerability...

The blade made contact. He went flying. He almost didn't know what had happened.

Stunned, Jazz skidded back along the floor of the old temple, and felt as if every exoskeletal plate had just been juddered off him. Jazz tried to right himself to his feet. The dark fog of shut-down flickered at the edge of his vision. The spot where he'd been hit with the flat of the blade seemed to have liquefied under the blow.

Then the great shadow fell over him.

_So this is what it's like_, Jazz thought in the aftermath of his pain. _This is what a solder might see, the last thing he ever sees._

"I didn't hit you that hard. You didn't follow my instructions." Optimus sounded so cold when he spoke in Alpha-dialect. The words could have come from Meridian himself.

For a moment the thrill-fear became real. Throttle-bot or otherwise, what did Jazz know of this mech apart from the fact his discipline required electrowhips and torture? Maybe Meridian had a reason to treat his slave that way.

Maybe Optimus was actually dangerous.

Then the spectre was gone and Optimus knelt by Jazz, his angular, Iacon-bred face restless with concern.

"Jazz?"

"That hurt, friend," gasped Jazz.

Optimus nodded diffidently, as if to say, _of couse it would hurt, why would you expect anything else? _

"Let us pause for a moment," Optimus said. "While you recover."

"Yeah," groaned Jazz, "And you can help me up while you're at it, too."

Still aching, he sat with Optimus at the far end of the temple hall, lit only by the delicate glow of the bacteria on the wall.

The pain had an upside. Jazz could feel every cable and servo in his body stretch and skew with his new injury. Jazz tested the strength of his arms, and was pleased at how a new flexibility had set into the architecture of his body, a strength that he had not possessed before. They had been training for several cycles now, in a range of fighting forms.

At first Jazz had been frustrated by their complexity, but as his body hardened, the mass-memory came. Jazz would never he able to match a skilled fighter of Optimus' size, but now he suspected that if push came to shove, he might just be able to hold his own.

Jazz watched Optimus surreptitiously out of the side of his visor. There was no doubt Optimus made an exellent instructor. Such a skill would easily have kept a 'bot in yellow energon, but Optimus never showed the slightest hint of rebellion. He was a true mystery.

Then his shoulder began to ache again, erasing his train of thought. Jazz rubbed his battered joint, feeling the hot heat of the nanites rushing to repair the damage.

Optimus haltingly conversed in the Autobot dialect that Jazz had been teaching him.

"If you master the _deflection_, it is not just the blows you will be able to stop, but the percussive blasts from ordinance. Shrapnel. Any application of force."

"So I'm not supposed to feel pain, then?"

"Not exactly an absence of pain. But you will retain balance. Your mind will stay clear enough."

Jazz was silent for a little while. There were things that Optimus was teaching him that he knew should not be taught until the highest levels of Academy training. Of course he knew that the best soldiers had a kind of invulnerability to the injuries of war. It was one of the mysteries that separated Autobot Academy graduates from the ordinary Autobot infantry.

"But how do you maintain that concentration all the time, Optimus?"

"You don't," said Optimus. "You have to put your..." he searched for the Autobot word, but not finding it in his new vocabulary fell back to the Alpha one. "Awareness into to the future. Know from where and when the pain will come."

"Of course." Jazz nodded, understanding now. "Some of our best soldiers are expected to have prescience, almost Oracle-knowledge of the future."

Who had told him that? Prowl, in one of their first classes. They had all thought the General was talking nonsense, it had been such a throwaway line. But this instruction made sense now.

"Then if you had to fight someone with this ability," asked Jazz, "How would you do it?"

"A slow weapon," said Optimus. "Time-bomb." A pause. "A blade, or a knife." Optimus retracted the plasma-blades from under his gauntlets. "Under the exoskeleton, between the plates, into the protomass." He jabbed two fingers into Jazz's side, making him squirm away.

The anaerobic glows gleamed off a silver scar on Optimus' back.

"Or an electrowhip," said Jazz, quietly.

Optimus nodded. "There's no defence for energized weapons."

Jazz stood up. "We need to try again."

"Are you sure? Not everyone is skilled in Deflection, and you're not... uh... exactly responding to training."

A quick flash of anger. "You think I'm not ready to be a soldier."

"No Jazz, I meant..."

"Hit me again."

He thought angrily about Warpath, the way the Alpha had humiliated him, the attempted rape. The blade landed.

It was the oddest feeling. The inertia of the blade catching his shoulder, the way the metal thwanged and curved around his armour. Optimus had given him a proper blow. The power diffused over him. There was no pain.

"No pain!"

"Well done," said Optimus, touching his temple in the old salute. "A few more and you should have the routine flashed onto your memory."

Unable to control his excitement, for the _deflection_ was the one thing he had struggled with after all their training sessions, Jazz threw his arms around Optimus, whooped, "Yes!"

Optimus didn't return the hug. He only looked at Jazz with a blank expression. Embarrassed, Jazz backed off.

"That was incredible," said Jazz. "I could feel the strike, but I couldn't, you know?"

"The ability is necessary for a warrior. The best ones have a degree of precognition. They can tell where a blow is going to land."

Jazz thought of Prowl.

"It would make one nearly undefeatable in combat," said Jazz thoughtfully.

Optimus nodded. "Nearly. If you're fighting someone experienced, the only way is with a blade. Close. In through the armour plates. You can't shoot him or bomb him. He'll dissipate any projectile or hit."

"Can you turn your armour down when they beat you?"

He shook his head. "An electro whip goes straight through."

"Does Meridian make you fight?"

"One day I will fight before witnesses." Optimus said wearily. "But I will lose. Then I will die."

A breeze was moving through the temple, the long harmonic moan of Cybertron. Jazz felt a switch move into place in his own mind. Something Optimus had said had registered with a previous program. But what? Jazz's first thought was the illegal fighting pits of the dark-half of Cybertron. Alphas were much the same as any cruel overseer, despite their finery. So Meridian was raising a big mech like this from the darkness, and teaching him how to fight. A gladiator was just as much a slave as a servant.

"Could you run away?" asked Jazz. "Overpower the Temple guards? You're strong enough, and they would be too busy looking after Prime to worry about you."

Optimus looked confused, and the old doltish, throttle-bot look returned. He turned his head aside. "They would find me."

"Optimus, they wouldn't _care_. They'll think you've run off to join the Deceptions, hanging out with Megatron."

Optimus' hand went to his chest, and he winced from a deep pain. Then he said, "I have made my peace with my fate Jazz, only that..." Optimus trailed off.

"What is it Optimus?" Jazz reached out to touch the great forearm, felt the deep tremble underneath.

"That I should tell you something. I should tell you the truth. The writings of Alpha Prime always speak about truth."

Jazz could smell the cyberemones on the big mech, that heightened pitch of sex and hunger and confusion.

"Optimus?"

"I feel..." Again the hand gripped the armour over his spark, a gesture that would have been crudely indecent if made in public but Optimus was too gauche to know any different. "I want..."

_To join sparks? is that it?_ Jazz could not speak the words. But he knew with an awful certainty that if Optimus were to take him with force, there was no way he could resist. He could be crushed to the ground, his chest plates torn open. A mech unused to restraint and morality only knew that body starvation needed to be fed any way, any how.

"Wait," said Jazz, "wait now."

As quick as if an order had been barked, Optimus withdrew, trembling as if he were resonating with a thousand discordant frequencies. Jazz knew he should walk away, but something kept Jazz there. Not pity. A sense of responsibility perhaps. He had opened the door to sensuality, given the slave-mech a glimpse of the pleasure and delight that would never be allowed. A profoundly cruel thing to do.

Jazz had not the experience or the confidence to take any living thing there, let alone this mech with his dangerous unknown qualities. All he had done was kiss. Nightbeat and Prowl, his two almost-lovers

"I love you Jazz," Optimus said, and it was almost a wail of surrender, a last gasp. "Nobody else has given me what you have. I cannot bear what I am!"

Jazz was shocked. His words were blurted out unthinkingly.

"Optimus, you're talking rusted. What we have isn't love. I love someone else, I couldn't ever be with you that way."

Too late. The words were said now, and they could not be redacted. Optimus' face was destroyed, the pieces crumpling up like some lumpish sculpture a sparkchild might make, scorned, then dashed against a wall.

"Oh Primus, I didn't mean that," stammered Jazz. "You took me by surprise, telling me."

"No. we are both talking truth." Optimus didn't sound angry. Just resigned.

Jazz was crushed by his guilt. He would have taken an electrowhip beating himself if he could have removed the devastation from those sparkchild's optics.

"How can I convince you otherwise Optimus? You are my friend."

Optimus made to move away and stand. Before he could, Jazz caught his arm impulsively, boosted himself forward and Jazz kissed him, because he wanted to make things right, because there was nothing else in the world that would heal the damage Jazz's careless words had caused.

Shyly, Optimus returned the kiss, and Jazz let his senses open up. He could have reduced his inputs, made the kiss perfunctory. That would have been unfair. So he let himself fall into everything that Optimus was, know him by his feel and taste. Optimus had such a deep taste to him, like the upwell of the River Blood before the black liquid oxidized. If Jazz was not used to such a colourscent, he might have been repulsed. But he had tasted black energon, the sludge synthesized from the River Blood in lieu of sunlight. This was Optimus, chemically aligned to the dark forgotten side of Cybertron.

Then they separated. Optimus clung to Jazz.

_What am I doing?_ thought Jazz. _I've gone too far._

It was wrong of him, but he kissed the slave-mech again, that big mouth trembling with fear and gratitude. This poor, big abandoned mech who had never known any affection now took each one of Jazz's simple kisses as if they were acts of sanctity and holiness. Each touch on his amour elicited a cry of awe.

Jazz let his pent-up feelings escape through those kisses. His homesickness for Stanix, his disappointment and having his dream slip through his hands. He shuttered his optics and thought about Prowl. If only it had been _him_ to receive Jazz like this. But Jazz had wished beyond his station, for a noblemech who had been in the presence of Primes, and now here he was in this dark hovel, clinging to a slave-mech, lowest of all. Yet there was something in his unbroken spark, some strange, expansive feeling he couldn't name. The feeling he had when he thought of Primus. Prima's face on the wall, watching them with a face so knowing, and yet so familiar, was like a recent memory.

"Jazz, Jazz," Optimus moaned. His Alpha accent was strong. He pressed his body close, the massive slabs of armour pressing against Jazz's own. His great hands flexed at his chest, not quite touching, but as if his spark had ignited there. "Oh Jazz I feel..."

Jazz patted Optimus's chest and pulled away, unsure at his body's own responses, the way his spark was set alight. A dark, flaring hunger was in the slave-mech's optics. Jazz's chest was hot and hurting with misplaced lust, his body exhibiting the desire to join sparks without understanding the context.

But they were both so inexperienced. Optimus could easily smash Jazz's spark off-centre out of sheer thoughtlessness. Then where would Jazz be? The centre of his erotic and intellectual being destroyed and ugly. He wouldn't be able to pay a whore to spark-mate with him after that.

He would have to go to the smelting-pits in shame, like Hound had told him.

Optimus was shaking visibly now. "I love you," he said again.

"I have to go now," said Jazz. "The prisons."

"Come back soon."

"I will," said Jazz.

Optimus nodded, too throttled and ignorant to see how Jazz's his optics were averted, as if trying to smooth over the lie.

* * *

The sunlight on the surface was harsh and unforgiving compared to the dim solace of bacteria glows. Jazz was almost relieved when he made his way back into the prison complex. The darkness reminded him of home.

But as the pneumatic elevator descended, he over heard snatches conversation between the guards, and remembered that the home he knew no longer existed. The Decepticons ruled that part of Cybertron now. All his friends, all the mechs he had shared his life with, were gone.

Ratchet tilted his head up as soon as Jazz stumbled in.

"You're early," he said. "And upset."

Jazz was about to lie, but found that he could not. "Ratchet, I think I've done something terrible."

Ratchet put his tools aside. He had just finished mech-surgery, and his arms were smeared with protomass. In any other situation Jazz might have been repulsed. A sol ago, definitely. Now, he barely noticed.

"Not terrible enough to have you end up here," said Ratchet wearily, wiping the protomass from his arms. His hands were stained a deep gunmetal black from mech essence.

"I betrayed a confidence. I took advantage of someone."

"Quit trying to tighen ten bolts at once, kid," gruffed Ratchet. "What did you do?"

Jazz had buried himself into trouble, messing with Meridian's fighting slave, and he had nobody who might give him advice. Unless they had tried to kill a god. Nothing that Jazz could say would be worse than that. His own concerns faded into a kind of pathetic nonsense.

"I made friends with a slave-mech. Since then I've become something more."

Ratchet peered at him and jumped to his own conclusions. "You shared sparks with a throttle-bot."

"No! I mean, not yet. He wants to. I led him on, made him want that thing and I agreed.I didn't want to hurt him!"

Ratchet did not condemn Jazz, but his face pavements tightened. "I don't need to tell you that there are issues with that kind of mech. Consent. Power. You having free will and him not. Most importantly, someone will own him."

"Senator Meridian."

"One of his? Slag, Jazz, have you no sense?"

Jazz wanted to unburden himself on Ratchet, and was prepared to tell him everything. The moment was ruined by the sounding of an alarm deep within the Decagon sub-structure.

"Emergency," said Ratchet. "Riot alarm. Looks like work."

No sooner had Ratchet spoken, a pair of prison guards dragged in a ruined mech who was missing an arm. Even locked up in prison, their civil war raged.

For the rest of the shift, Jazz didn't get to talk to Ratchet much more than what was necessary to keep the ten prisoners injured alive, and afterwards an unsteady, exhausted Ratchet was permitted to go to his berth to recharge.

Jazz did not feel he could recharge. He was still trying to process the images of Optimus with the images of the hurt prisoners, trying to arrange them in his mind so they would not affect his dreams. He made his way instead to the small Primus chapel, set aside for the use of guards and privileged prisoners, but hardly ever used in these end-times.

* * *

The chapel was quiet, almost like the Prima shrine. As he knelt before the carved stone icon of the Matrix, Jazz felt under his chest plates for his amulet.

His fingers did not touch the rough metal surface. They touched nothing.

Alarmed, Jazz opened his chest-armour and his spark case. The space where he always kept his amulet was bare.

_Primus, I've lost it!_

"Think," said Jazz sternly to himself. The icon could have fallen out in Ratchet's med-bay. Some of those prisoners had been big. All it would have taken would have been a twist of his upper half in the opposite direction to his lower. The amulet could have fallen out and into the mess of spare parts and massflesh that littered Ratchet's floor.

Or it could be at the Prima shrine, betraying his friendship with Optimus. Who else could have gotten so close?

"Slag, I'll kill that mech!" Jazz cursed.

"Kill who?"

Jazz turned. Prowl had slipped into the chapel.

"I... uh... I just lost something."

"Thievery is not tolerated. You should report it to the guards."

Jazz prudently kept his mouth shut.

The General slid onto the seat next to him. "How has your time been here? Instructive?"

Jazz nodded absently, still trying to work out a way to slip back into the Prima shrine, retrieve the amulet and give Optimus – if he was there – a piece of his mind.

"I'm glad you've learnt well, because we've had an opening for the Autobot Academy."

The amulet suddenly lost its place in the processing queue as Jazz stared at Prowl.

"An opening? I've been selected to go?"

Prowl huffed a breath. "Whoa, don't get ahead of yourself soft shell. I said there was an opening. I didn't say we've had our final selection tests yet."

Jazz shook his head, not quite understanding. "Tests? What do I have to do?"

"For the records, you're still part of the unit you were originally assigned to. You have done extraordinarily well here. So you still get credit for your time served. However you still have one more test to pass."

Jazz knew what Prowl was going to say even before the words came out.

"Combat. You have to fight a mech, and the winner will receive the Academy place."

"I have not been taught Combat," said Jazz lowly. "Why would you offer me this test if I have not studied Combat?"

Prowl was impassive. "I am not the one who chooses which Prospect fights whom. You're lucky even to get this chance."

"Then when shall I attend this combat test?" asked Jazz, betrayed by the cavalier way he had been thrown into certain failure. As far as anybody knew, Jazz had never fought anyone outside of a Tactical board. He decided to put telling off Optimus until after he had prepared.

"Now," said Prowl. "The selectors are waiting."

"Now! I haven't even recharged."

"Then don't bother. Warpath will gain entry by default," said Prowl. He stood up, and his chainmail cloak scraped angrily over the rusted iron floor.

Jazz stared after the General, conflicted and torn, betrayed and ashamed. Warpath had just been given a clear path into the Academy. He would fight the untrained drop-out and win by a clear margin, be promoted to squad leader by the strength of his victory alone.

But nobody knew that Jazz could fight now, did they?

"Wait," cried Jazz, dashing to catch up with Prowl before he reached the tubes. "I'll do it. I'll complete the Combat test..."

* * *

.

.

.

(TBC)


End file.
